Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

If you're in an environment where you care about certain things a great deal, then yes cut the middleman out of those things, as far down as you need to. If that means no longer using a distribution at all, or moving to another platform, so be it.

For typical medium shops, the middleman feature can make "the rest" of the system work fine with better quality and less effort.

For smaller shops, the middleman feature can be used everywhere.

Of course, if the middleman becomes untrustworthy, get a new one.

I could point to literally *hundreds* of times that the middleman has made my use of software vastly more pleasant than simply acquiring the software from the creator. I can point to about 2 where it has gone the other way.