Not really, I just prefer the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. I hated upstart when it was introduced too, it broke stuff so I had to replace it with the unsupported (but fully functional) sysvinit every time. I still don't like the fact that it obsoleted /etc/inittab and that it has both old fashioned /etc/init.d and a /etc/init, because I have to look in 2 places to find a config or script. But it does give me a getty on whatever I set as console on the kernel commandline and it's definitely not broken out of the box any more, so I'm game.

You might think of a tiling window manager as being the greatest invention since sliced bread, but having to configure it in Haskell FFS (I'm looking at you, xmonad) just doesn't jive with me. Nor does any other tiling window manager except WindowMaker (oh, pardon me, that's a tiled window manager). KDE is just as bad because it has too many bells and whistles, it doesn't follow KISS principles. Is that a straw man to you?

Gnome managed to create a nice iteration of gnome-shell with 3.6, but it was riddled with bugs (it still is, albeit to a lesser extent). Then they had to ruin it in 3.8. Categories are for losers, right? Let's remove that. And no one ever needs accessibility, right? Let's git rid of that, too. And what's with all these keyboard layout options? Can't have that, way too useful! Yeah we put some of them back in gnome-tweak-tool but not all because obviously no one ever used them for anything. The final straw for Gnome (for me) was when shell extensions that were never meant to appear in the lock screen, did in fact, appear in the lock screen. The gnome-screensaver they got rid of did one thing really well, but they couldn't find a way to let it display notifications so they axed it.

I'll do my best to make Fedora 20 work because it offers the option of installing MATE, which is Gnome 2.x based. So it packages all of the latest gizmo's (for better or worse) and presents it with a friendly face without an identity crisis (it knows it's a PC, not a tablet). Though I'm on my 3rd install now, at some point the installer stops working resulting in a blinking cursor when I turn it off and on. It works perfectly in a VM, but I want the real deal. (It did pass verification.)