I hate Unity myself, but I've switched to Xubuntu. There's also Kubuntu, and even if these are supported by the community, they do a better job than most other distros.
Also don't be fooled by stats.
With HUD in 12.04, it's the only widely-used DE I can control almost entirely with keyboard.
but ubuntu is still an organisation to support especially in terms of them helping produce hardware that will be 100% linux compatible no matter what distro i choose to run.
I don't know what resources you are talking about, but it's definitely not wasting my screen resources as others do.
My vertical spaced is saved my menu-on-panel integration, on fullscreen title goes into panel too. Left-panel is also nice, it doesn't do "minimize on second click" as docky or others, it does nice "overview" on click on multi-window app. And finally, it also saves space by combining launcher and app-switcher.