I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.

Linux Mint surely is disabling more “features” from Ubuntu than it’s using at this point.

Only issue I can see with LMDE compared to the Ubuntu variant is that some of their homegrown tools and stuff aren’t included in LMDE for whatever reason. But, if they shifted their focus to LMDE and added all the tools there to give you the proper Mint experience, I think it would be amazing.