And that is exactly why I switched to OpenSUSE
All this sounds like a tantrum. I understand perfectly the frustration that one must feel after throwing a considerable amount of his personal wealth on Canonical and not seeing any real impact on any market you've tried to put your feet on. I, however, cannot agree with all the different directions Canonical is trying to move at the same time, obviously looking for a source of revenue, without not much consideration of community feedback along the way.
I've huge respect for what Ubuntu has done for the Linux community, not perhaps in terms of code contributions but certainly on the expansion of Linux mind share. Linux -and Ubuntu- are now in more people's minds than eight years ago thanks to Canonical. Without Ubuntu we'd likely not have Mint, or GedUbuntu, or KUbuntu.
But note that if Ubuntu continues to evolve in the direction Canonical is driving it, all these grandchildren will have at some point to stop being based on Ubuntu and switch to something else, likely Debian (Mint has already done something in this regard, I believe) unless they adopt Unity, something very unlikely because their identity for most of them revolves around exactly not using Unity.
Unity and the Mir/Wayland war were the last straws that drove me to switch and now I live happy in OpenSUSE land: they give priority to robustness over leading-edgeness, they pay attention to the small details, and I've so far not found any missing package from the ones I used with (K)Ubuntu. But I started to think about it when they started to give priority to hitting the release date over fixing critical bugs, and again I assumed that this was some business driven mandate to improve its image with business "customers" (whoever they are/were).
Sorry Mark, I wish you have a tremendous success with some of your initiatives, you really deserve it, but Ubuntu and derivatives are no longer for me.