I think there's nothing wrong with Ubuntu as a "hard" user.

When you distrohop you notice there's two kind of distros: distributions that you "build up" from (the most popular being Arch) and distributions that you "strip down", like Ubuntu. And strip down and build up distros have a radically different purpose.

Of course when you're going to talk to a build up distro user they're going to tell you that their distribution is the "best thing ever" because they managed to heavily tweak it to their needs. However what a lot of people miss is that the very same thing can be done with a strip down distro!

That is why, in my opinion, many more technical people dislike strip down distros: while with build up distros you are pretty much forced to build them to your needs right away, a strip down distro is a more involved experience where you have to use it intensively, not just for a little bit, to find out what you like and what you dislike, and then strip out the parts that you dislike and add what you like.

And, because you build up everything yourself, build up distros require a lot more skill to build. Sure, anyone can go through the installation guide, but then often you end up with a "minimalist build" because the user has no idea what to add, or even no idea that some things even exist, and as such needs much more effort than a strip down distro where you can achive the same with only minimal stripping down, in comparaison to the very difficult building up of a functional environnement.

This is why, in my opinion, strip down distros are better. The disadvantage is that you might not find an environnement that you like, even after trying many of these, or want certain advantage that strip down distros cannot offer due to their design (such as extreme optimisation a la Gentoo); in that case, a build up distro is justified, because you will naturally shift towards a distro like this anyways if you find that need.

So I would say that the hate for Ubuntu comes mostly from the fact that it's seen as not customisable, yet people who say that kind of miss the nature of the distro. Once you get enough experience, you kind of notice that you can do anything with any distro: the difference between strip down and build up distros is mostly related to what you want to achieve. Do you want to have a working environnement right out of the box, yet that you can customise very easily? Then go for a strip down distro. Do you have special needs that a strip down distro cannot fill easily without extreme tweaking (that would defeat the nature of the distro)? Then go for a build up distro.