This is the point that the haters are missing. We're using a heavily modified bootstrap with backbone, and it has dramatically decreased our turnaround for new UI features. Other than the button styles, you can't really tell it's there. To me, bootstrap is CSS boilerplate that is clever and thoroughly tested, so you know when you copy a component or a design pattern from it, chances are it will Just Work. Creating customer-facing sites from 100% vanilla bootstrap isn't ideal unless you are building an MVP or some administration panel where a custom design wouldn't necessarily improve the user experience. It also really raises the lowest common denominator for teams that can't afford a lot of design work. I think bootstrap has been a great boon to web UI in general, and I am looking forward to seeing it evolve and inspire other frameworks in the future.

I think you're missing the point of Bootstrap. It's meant to keep your site looking nice while you bootstrap it; to avoid doing a ton of graphic design work before you even have a working prototype. Once you're able to spend money on graphic design, you probably won't be using Bootstrap.

How much of a site's personality would you consider is design, vs content and UX? I'm considering tweaking the over all colors and such for unscatter.com and chatfor.us (when I move chatfor.us to bootstrap) in order to differentiate them. I just haven't put a large focus on that, choosing to focus more on the functionality of the sites.

I guess my opinion is Bootstrap is a great way to have an acceptable looking front end while you focus on building out your minimum feature set.

Planscope has a great design out of the Twitter Bootstrap: https://planscope.io/

Though I don't use their site I think https://kippt.com/ did a pretty good job at making bootstrap their own (though you can't really tell the good ones are done in bootstrap)