I see the "dumbed down" complaint a lot, but I don't understand it. What is missing from Unity that you could do before? Or is it that if something is pretty or simple it is automatically worth less somehow than something ugly or complicated?

For me Unity is far more powerful out of the box than GNOME 2 was. Being able to position and tile windows with the keyboard and having 10 applications easily and automatically bound to a keystroke are huge timesavers for me.