This Mint leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Part I

I try and be unbiased and open minded in my job in IT. I make an effort not to get too attached to brands or companies. Plus I just like to know what's out there and try it all. One of the things I do to keep up is try out different Linux distributions a couple times a year. 
Before Christmas I decided to take a look at Linux Mint 14.1 - Cinnamon (Which I'll call LMC from now on). It gets mentioned by a lot of people as a good alternative to the pestilence that is Ubuntu so, based on all the positive mentions, I was anxious to give LMC a look.
First, on a positive note. It is a big improvement over Ubuntu. The install is fairly clean and simple, though honestly I'd prefer the option to have more fine grained control during the install. But, for new Linux users the simplicity will be a bonus. For someone that loved Ubuntu but has been looking for an alternative since that train went off the rails, LMC is definitely worth a look.
The look of LMC's UI and themes once you finish the install and boot is again clean and simplistic, though it seems a little dated to me style wise.
Administration tools are more complete and better laid out than in Ubuntu, which is good, but they are still lacking and advanced users will find them frustrating.
Package management is typical for a Debian/Ubuntu type distro and while it's good, it's certainly not the package management nirvana that Debuntu fans like to think it is. It's certainly not superior to the better RPM based distro's as they believe. But it's good.
The default software repositories seem to suffer from the same nonsense that plagues all Debian based distro's. A dearth of important proprietary packages due to their "iceweasel" attitude. For example, try finding Adobe Acrobat Reader. You'll find lots of crap substitutes, but none of the real deal. Yes I'm sure it's out there, but not from the default repositories which is where most users will know to look for it. If they go looking for it at Adobe's site they won't have any luck unless they know to download and manually install the binary installer version or think to dig down the Adobe download menu to find and try the Debian version.
Another area that was decent was the inclusion of nVidia binary drivers in the default software manager list. For those that actually want to use their expensive graphics card this is a must and the nouveau driver just doesn't cut it. On the downside the version of the nVidia driver in the software manager was quite old. I'm not sure why they don't do this like OpenSUSE does and link their repository to the nVidia server so they'll aways have the latest version available. 
Another thing I didn't like is that LMC 14.1 runs an EOL'd,  unstable, 3.5 kernel version for some reason. Why wouldn't they go with the stable 3.4 LTS kernel?

To be continued...