Never had a big problem with the Linux version. It does video, with good quality, and that's all you really need Skype for, a flashy UI or other pointless features just detracts from Skype's main purpose.
Totally agreed. I used to be annoyed by the absence of SMS support in one of the previous versions. I havent bothered checking whether it is present now, since I no longer need that feature anyway.
They've promised to open-source the UI and put out most of the functionality in a blob that the UI talks to, maybe over D-Bus or something I guess. That was quite a while ago, though.