I actually think all this ambivalence is Ubuntus bigest problem. Now it has become apparent that all along they wanted to go down the path of only using the kernel, and then build a whole new software-stack on top of it, just like Android.
But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that's full of bugs and obviously not stable yet).
Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this, I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of alienating them selves.
I don't think it is the case that they had always planned to build a whole new software stack. And that's not even what they're doing - Ubuntu runs loads of 'Linux ecosystem' applications, which Android never aimed to do.
On the system level, only last year they were talking about one day moving to Wayland - which they later decided against for reasons I don't know enough about to judge. My understanding is that they only made Unity because they felt they didn't have enough influence in the design of Gnome 3. I don't think there's as much of a master plan as you suggest.
But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that's full of bugs and obviously not stable yet).
Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this, I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of alienating them selves.