It just doesn't seem like a very hard problem to solve.
And, despite what the Mint guys claim, Ubuntu appears to have solved it just fine.
EDIT: upgraded from petra, not olivia
This is the same mindset that blows up production systems with ad-hoc maladministration instead of following sound, documented procedures created with the input of people who actually understand the system and thoroughly tested in advance.
True, I did say that Ubuntu has solved this problem. For them, dist-upgrades are well understood and not blind luck. If you're disagreeing with that statement, I'd like to hear more.
Ubuntu specifically tells you not to do a dist-upgrade, so your supposed evidence of how easy it must be doesn't even pass the smell test. The "correct" upgrade process is do-release-upgrade.
Unfortunately, that process still is not a complete solution, as demonstrated by the multiple clusterfucks I've had to clean up when people tried to use their upgrade process.
Even if they had succeeded, that would tell you nothing -- Ubuntu is a commercial operation with a substantial amount of money behind it. Linux Mint is not. ReactOS would be a perfect Windows clone if everything a funded corporation accomplished were easy.
For any given problem, only people who have not tried to solve it will say that.
In the end, reinstalling Mint from a USB drive (preserving $HOME) took just a few minutes and the driver worked instantly.
So don't forget about this kind of dependencies before considering a dist-upgrade.