In reality, whoever is unhappy screams and claims to speak for "the community" as a way of trying to get their way. And almost always someone is unhappy.
Most of the time, an equally large subset of the community is not screaming because they are happy with that decision.
You could chase one side of the community and then the other forever, without reaching a stable outcome.
Make a dialog at the start of the session when you release new features, asking if you'd like to enable new features or keep your old settings for existing users. Install new features on by default. Everyone happy, no complaints.
Then collect stats after some time and see what is actually getting used and if 95% is in favor of some option - remove the old feature.
This could also be a nice incentive to provide stats to developers - your opinion gets counted.
I mean, you test on the latest version of Ubuntu, then the LTS version, then with Gnome3, MATE and Xfce, then with Kubuntu and Xubuntu, better test all of those in 32 bit as well as 64 bit, and with free and nonfree drivers for Intel ATI and nVidia graphics cards, and you're sick of testing before you've even got off the major Ubuntu variants.
Or you don't test like that, and I find I can't get Google Earth to work, or I get VPN software that can't disconnect properly if I use the Gnome3 network manager, or any of a dozen other annoyances.
There are plenty of examples: globalmenu on/off, globalmenu hidden/showed by default, buttons on the left/right side of the window, size of the icons in the launcher, side of the screen on which the launcher appear, show the launcher on every screen or only the main one...
All you can do right now is to move the global menu from the "global" bar to the window bar. You can't still have it back to "default", like other operative systems, and you can't still have it being visible by default.
And, by the way, this was just one small point of my post. Everything else still applies.
If Ubuntu listens to the loudest community whiners the UI would be a terrible mess. If you don't like the default desktop: sudo apt-get install -y fluxbox, or whatever of the dozens of other WM's are out there that you like better. Problem solved.
By default like the operative system with 90%+ of the marketshare - Windows. I'm not saying that they're doing it good, but 90%+ of the people using a computer expect it to act that way. I'm also not saying that it should be the default, just have a tiny little option somewhere (instead of forcing me to remove the appmenu* packages, which I know how to do it, but my parents sure don't).
I'm also not sure why are you attacking me and telling me to install another DE - I have (In fact, I don't even use Ubuntu anymore, as I don't like apt-get and some other stuff). I'm just saying that they should add some options to make everyone happy. I have the same feeling towards Gnome shell, but at least this one has easy-to-install plugins.
For my parents I have installed Kubuntu, KDE always works and always has the features you need.
They've already given users several choices. They're called Kubuntu, Xubuntun and Lubuntu.