Since I haven't found a roadmap or mission statement on their site, would it be correct to summarize Elementary OS as an attempt to simply user interfaces and application development?

I laughed when I read the "Minimal Documentation" guideline in their design philosophy. Yes, aiming to make an application intuitive is great, but I first thought of how many developers achieve the Minimal Documentation goal in another sense.

It looks like they have put a lot of work into applications that meet their design goals, instead of rolling just another distro remix with the same old repositories, although it is listed as Ubuntu based on DistroWatch.

In case anyone else wants to look at their forum, it's at http://elementaryforums.org/ For such a UX focused project I find it unfortunate that they don't have a link to it on their support page and their answer service is listed as down from the home page even though I was able to reach it through Google.