Comment by mikestorrent

Ultimately this boils down to lack of clear technical and community leadership from Canonical. Too unwilling to say "no" to vanity/pet projects that end up costing all of us as they make the resulting distribution into a moving target too difficult to support in the enterprise - at least, not with the skillset of the average desktop support hire these days.

I want to go to the alternate timeline where they just stuck with a set of technologies... ideally KDE... and just matured them up until they were the idealized version of their original plan instead of always throwing things away to rewrite them for ideological or technical purity of design.