It's bizarre for me... I see every single release better in general, but worse in details. I just keep a list of things to unbreak after installation. Even though I like the whole system, they seem to be going for the new and shiny stuff too much and I don't think they'll ever going to produce a mature system.

Some examples: F-spot was replaced with Shotwell instead of fixing F-spot's problems (if there were any, I was happy with it). My scanner worked out of the box with xsane (even launched it after plugging in), now with simple-scan not only I cannot change resolution, but it doesn't detect the device until I install xsane itself. On top of that, there are silly issues like the "Play log-in sound" checkbox, which is broken for the last 2 years, even though there were many bugs reported for it. Or automatically enabling 3'rd mouse button emulation with no way to disable it via GUI (non-starter for FPS gamers) - there's a different way to disable it for every single version because of the xorg -> hal -> udev -> xinput (broken xorg-snippets) -> working xorg-snippets migration.

Ubuntu seems to be going for the new and shiny and noone cares what regressions will it cause. This is not something "normal users" will let them do. I can fix it by hand, report a bug (and silently be angry that it's ignored for years), but a typical user will say "it's broken" and that will be the end of his ubuntu experience. If they don't bring quality to the table soon, they'll just annoy new potential users.