if you wanted to challenge something claimed as stable and reliable, you should had gone onto debian. ubuntu is canonical's proposition to get a linux distro for a non-geek audience. that's why they have ditched gnome shell, kde and other desktops for unity. and all the issues you said for unity have been corrected in 12.04, which comes out thursday and i recommend it to you.
I tried Debian before Ubuntu. It’s even worse. At least Ubuntu tries to be usable, even if they have no idea what they’re doing.