Because Ubuntu has become, for the last 2 years or so, a game of "what will they break next". Started, arguably, with the not-even-halfbacked initial Pulseaudio implementation, and continuing on to Unity.
Canonical seem to be playing the long game and tossing things out as they become available. It's like a waiter bringing you your meal as each piece gets done cooking. First he brings the sauce, then he brings the chicken, then he brings your beer, then he brings the beans. It might be a fantastic meal when put together properly, but piecemeal it's just an unappetizing mess.
I have no doubt that Ubuntu 16.04 (or whenever they finish) will be amazing, but in the meantime I really wish they would just wait until they have everything ready.
* It's like a waiter bringing you your meal as each piece gets done cooking.*
And then when you complain, they say, "don't be a whiner, you received a three-course chicken cordon-bleu meal prepared by a trained French chef!" Nevermind that it was out of order and disassembled.
I recently migrated my main desktop back from Windows 7 to Linux, and I actually ended up on Fedora. I've been pretty pleased with it overall. Sure, I ripped out Gnome 3 and dropped in KDE 4.8, but on the whole it really works quite well, including 3D (I recently replaced my old ATI card with an NVidia 560, which certainly helped).
Surprised even me. My linux journey, going back 12 or so years, was more or less Mandrake -> Debian -> Gentoo -> FreeBSD -> Ubuntu - Slackware. I tried Debian recently, didn't really like where any of the distros fell - unstable was TOO bleeding edge, while even testing lagged annoyingly far behind. Arch is nice, and I like it on servers but too fiddly for a desktop. Fedora really seems to be right around the sweet spot where it's useable, pretty up to date, but more importantly it's very much "linux" as I remember it, not with lots of not-very-well documented magic going on.
See, I have a different story with Fedora (and maybe this is partly due to Gnome 3). I installed it on my desktop/home server. I've got 6 hard drives, and I couldn't manage to get SMART warnings to stop popping up because one of them had 6 reallocated sectors. Like, every 3 minutes SMART was screaming at me.
Then I was trying to install Amahi and it required a package that was different than one that was installed by default. I could not figure out how to get yum to replace the current package with the one my software needed. The help from the developers? "--force is never a good option, so we don't offer it". Thank you, Microsoft, for protecting me from myself. I uninstalled the package, and it automatically uninstalled Network Manager and everything related to DHCP/networking. After that, I couldn't install the package I wanted because I couldn't configure a network connection.
It really seems the only time I have to resort to using the command line is when the distro's "intelligence" breaks the GUI. Ubuntu doesn't not break things, but at least when it does I know the best recourse (since I partition /home on it's own drive) is to just reinstall. Wouldn't have fixed a thing in Fedora.
I grew up on a command line, and I really hate being forced to go back to that just because the developers don't care enough make the GUI work properly.
Ubuntu 11.04 is a few versions behind on node.js. So a lot of modules won't install. If they're behind there I'm sure they're also behind in other programming environments as well. You can always install these things from source, but for programmers a rolling release distro like Debian or Arch makes more sense.