I think this is a reminder that different interfaces work for different people. I think that the Unity interface, with its hidden menu bars, application menus, scroll bars, etc. is almost perfect and a clear step in the right direction (with the huge exception that it crashes frequently, hopefully this will be fixed for me in the 14.04 release). The idea that I would ever access a drop down menu by mouse is in some way ridiculous and signifies a failure of the application's user interface. Again, that is what I think and it is obvious that other people think drastically different things.
Typically via holding alt and pressing short cut keys. That is the old way to do it. Unity introduced a new way to do it where you use the alt key and a text box comes up which allows you to search the options by keyword. It could be done better in Unity, but I still like it better than searching though the hierarchy that mostly never made sense to me.
The real answer is that things like Vim and Emacs long ago came up with interfaces that don't require toolbars/menubars. They were added a long time ago, but I am amongst the people that turn them off and don't use them even though they are available. For many of us, mousing is less efficient than well tuned muscle memory.
Perhaps so. I tried Ubuntu with Unity a little while ago and didn't like it much--I'm used to minimizing to the taskbar and seeing the names of the programs. I settled on Linux Mint as it offers a clean and "classical" way of doing things.
I'll consider trying out Ubuntu again when 14.04 LTS comes out this month. Maybe I'll get used to it, who knows.
To me Unity just made sense and if not for it crashing entirely too often and incurring a performance hit due to all the eye candy, I wouldn't look further.
To me the nice thing about GNU/Linux on the desktop is that each person can have the interface they want. This has secondary benefits where if you have your interface which is significantly different from my preferred interface, it forces application developers that really care about supporting their users to develop high quality abstraction layers that support both. The same goes for software packaging, driver support, general compatibility of proprietary software, etc. So, by all means, keep using Mint, it is in my best interest if you do (and yours, and everybody elses).
