Upstart is a bad example. pacman is a package manager only used by Arch Linux and nowhere else. Should Arch abandon it because it hasn't seen wide use yet? Better yet, there are plenty of package managers that are better than both aptitude and pacman (
http://nixos.org/). Should we abandon the technically inferior solutions for the technically superior ones?
Unity is the same way: it is open source. If you don't like it, fork it and fix it. Or use one of the alternatives. This is not Windows or OS X. Vote with your feet and move over to Gnome 3, Xfce, LXDE, or another DE. If enough people do, Canonical will see the effects and stop putting effort into Unity.
IMHO, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of everyone trying to pull it into their own direction. Companies are often forced to cooperate when they don't have another choice, but if they did, they would push their own ideas of what the infrastructure should be on everyone else.
Unity is the same way: it is open source. If you don't like it, fork it and fix it. Or use one of the alternatives. This is not Windows or OS X. Vote with your feet and move over to Gnome 3, Xfce, LXDE, or another DE. If enough people do, Canonical will see the effects and stop putting effort into Unity.
IMHO, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of everyone trying to pull it into their own direction. Companies are often forced to cooperate when they don't have another choice, but if they did, they would push their own ideas of what the infrastructure should be on everyone else.