I think the author went way overboard with making the down side of the appearance sound like an insult rather than some type of constructive feedback to be taken or left by Clem and team. While I also agree that the current desktop of Mint 12 is not a great turnout, possibilities exist to make a tremendous amount of positive change as users provide feedback and suggestions.
I think a point many like the author miss is Clem and team is a very very small team, unlike the ubuntu dev team. I commend Clem for listening so well to his user base and doing all he could to implement the sentiments of the users. Nobody can dispute his devotion to the community.
Where I think there is room for improvement is moving Mint from being like everybody else, which appears difficult within Gnome Shell. However, it's very possible to do as evidenced by
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=205&t=85775 It's not an exact replacement of Mint using Gnome 2, but nothing will be. However, it makes it obvious that the modularity of Gnome 3 can be exploited in such a way using extensions that the Gnome 3/Gnome Shell Mint desktop very closely mimics the look and some of the behaviors the users so desperately wanted to keep if at all possible.
Hopefully as extensions continue to be built we'll see Gnome 3 evolve into a great environment as each distro puts its twist on it. Mint can improve a great deal and provide users what they want with the look, feel and polish the Mint team has always placed, but the default Mint 12 desktop isn't quite up to the visual and functional standard the distro has always maintained. In that link above, promise is shown that maybe we can tweak 12 to be just what we hoped it would become.
