Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

There's a big difference between forcing a user to make a decision and allowing the user to make a decision.

I agree that having a desktop environment that put the user through a long Q&A session to have them select the options for their desktop would be a disaster.

but removing the option for the user to change something that bugs them is just as bad.

People can easily ignore options. firefox about:config has hundreds, if not thousands of options (plus there are other things you can tweak in config files), most firefox users aren't even aware that about:config even exists, so those options don't hurt the user.

remember that every plugin/extension is an option, so by allowing them to exist you are creating a huge number of additional 'options' or 'decisions' for the user, probably far more options (and harder decisions) than if the features were included to begin with.

Provide the best defaults that you can, but provide the options to allow people to override the defaults.

Even better, if you can gather information about what defaults get overriden frequently, look into what is getting changed and why, and either make it easier to change that sort of thing, figure a way to guess the right setting for a user, or consider changing your default.