prefer to use a distro that's *not* oriented toward a particular desktop when trying it out; I'm sure Kubuntu and others provide nicely preconfigured stuff, but from a usability perspective I'm interested in the stock shipping version of the environment, not the version you get after a third party intercepts it and fixes things to make it easier ;)
This entire paragraph sums up what you are trying to summarily speak about.
This is why we are having such a mis-intepretation of things.
This explains many, many, many of arguements here.