I remember the switch. That's when I switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, where I still am.

Ubuntu MATE is a phenomenal distro. For VMs and lower resource machines it is always my go to.

Not to imply that it isn't valuable on high end machines (it is), but I personally really like Gnome 3 these days once I got used to it's way of doing things.

When someone complains that they enjoyed using DE X, and the distro switches to DE Y, they get told that they can just install and keep using DE X. When they later come asking about issues they're having related to DE X, they get told that it's not officially supported and that they should probably switch to DE Y.

Both responses on their own are perfectly reasonable, but it's understandable if users get a bit frustrated.

They aren't just changing the default, they are dropping it entirely. The GNOME port is noticeably different. Apparently some other company is going to continue work on the original Unity and I hope that works out.

To give another example, one upgrade my Xmodmap stopped working, and I had to stop everything to learn how xkb worked. If there is some package I could install to just have Xmodmap work again, that'd be great, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.