Yes, they lost me on the lack of upgrades. When a new version came out, I saw there were a few random blogs posts on how to do a very much unsupported upgrade through the command line. But I avoided the risk. Since I'd have to do a reinstall anyway, I downloaded stock Ubuntu and never looked back. And I was a happy Elementary OS user. Alas, I can understand where they were coming from, though, on that decision. They are/were a small, scrappy team and the QA effort for testing upgrade processes is non-trivial. They had to pick their battles on what to support. I didn't agree with their choice, but I can empathize with them on why they did it.