When Ubuntu first came along, I was a Linux user, and I tried Ubuntu on a few different occasions, but I never liked it mostly for the same reasons why people seem to be complaining. It just felt like eye candies tacked onto Debian. There are many other good distributions that are geared toward power users. Why are so many complaining?
I've yet to run into any situation where using Ubuntu has constrained me in any way vs. using another Linux distribution (and I've used a bunch of different ones over the years).
For the most part my "tweaks" consists of a git repo of my dot-files, and I rarely run more than a couple of full screen browser windows and a bunch of full screened terminal windows.
I'd say if anything it's better than apt-get since the packages are updated so often!