I agree and disagree with your post.
First, I don't see how Lion and Mountain Lion are worse than Snow Leopard since they are practically the same. The only noticeable difference is a few new features added and some UI changes.
I purchased the Mid-2011 27" iMac but later in the year so it came with Lion, previously they were still being produced with Snow Leopard preinstalled. At that point I was pretty excited because I didn't want to pay for the software upgrade. So I pulled it out of the box and started to use Software Update to get it up-to-date and it was incredibly slow downloading the updates (literally hours over my home internet connection which is nowhere near as slow with my Mid-2008 (pre-unibody) MacBook Pro), then after about a week of installing, updating, then using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, I had sporadic crashes while trying to save work. Then another crash, then another and more after that, every time losing the work I had done. I did a Google search for incompatibility issues with Lion and found that most people had some success after doing a fresh reinstall of the OS (after just having spent HOURS updating the first time), so I knew there wasn't a physical disc in the box when I unpacked it, so I had assumed that Apple had installed it on an invisible partition on the drive, so I restarted the computer while holding down the alt/option key and sure enough there was a Recovery option. I selected that and it prompted me to DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE INTERNET. A WHOLE OS, ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME!!!!?!? So I didn't have a choice, it was either that or pack everything up and lug it through a mall to an Apple store. After an entire day of downloading Lion and I mean that literally, it took the better part of 8 hours to download and install the OS, which I'm assuming I would have to do again, if I ever had anymore problems.
To make a long story short, because I'm actually tired of recounting the experience and typing at this point. I reinstalled and everything was still the same. Lion and Mountain Lion are different than Snow Leopard in every imaginable way as far as convenience is concerned. Apple does not provide any physical backup of the OS for starters. I know you can download one from the App store and make a USB key, which I was thinking about doing before Apple Care told me that I would have to pay for THAT copy of Lion. The only "free" copy I get is when I use the recovery partition to download it. I've both talked to Apple Care and Apple employees at the mall and both have confirmed it to be the case, so don't try and dispute it by saying that it should be so, because I thought it was BS myself and tried to find a way around it and couldn't. So that's one of the primary differences. I enjoy having a physical recovery backup no matter how bad Apple does not want me to.
Updates are slow in Lion on my mac, since I've downgraded back to Snow Leopard with the Recovery OS disc I bought from Apple Care for $17.99 (THE BEST $17.99 I'VE EVER SPENT), updates are normal.
There are no more hangups or crashes while saving my work in any of my Adobe products.
All of the extra BS that Apple has added to make the desktop experience more like the iPhone and iPad are now gone and my computer has gone back to being a computer and ceases to annoy the s*** out of me every time I try and download a YouTube video and can't find the activity window.
In finder I can turn off the little previews but still get the detailed information about the file, which under Lion would hang up my computer if it was a video file.
Basically, my computer with the 32GB of RAM that I got from OWC is acting like a computer with 32GB of RAM and not a $3,000 POS now I've gone back to Snow Leopard and I am more than willing to never update the OS because it's the best that is ever going to come out of Apple for now on.
I know they removed Expose and Front Row which sucked, but they also added Launchpad which I believe is one of the best OS X features ever, it's so much quicker launching apps now. They also added full screen apps as well which is a great feature.
I deleted Front Row using AppZapper because Apple can't make iTunes categorize movie files as TV shows, even if you change them manually, they show up as 'Untitled' in Front Row. Apple should spend more time on working out the bugs in iTunes than adding unnecessary features like Launchpad. That's what the Dock or the Applications folder in the dock are for. Same amount of clicks to use both (Applications Folder/Launchpad) even less if have the application pinned to the dock. Sorry that you like the OS to be more iPhone like, but I do not. It's frivolous fluff/bulk I don't want added to my computing experience. Full Screen Apps are annoying, especially when you start a movie and it does that retarded animation of sliding over into another screen. I'd like to know what idiot thought of that. Why not just have it go full screen in the existing space, rather than having a useless transition animation like that. It's pointless bulk. Period.
You might argue that Snow Leopard was more stable and quicker, but I personally haven't noticed anything in those areas, they all run quickly and I rarely experience problems. Also, Steve Jobs was still the CEO of Apple when they released Lion, so if it does suck, then surely he has to take some of the blame.
Snow Leopard is not only faster than Lion and Mountain Lion with an SSD and 32GB of RAM...it's faster. Period. No fluff, just a streamlined computing experience with no slow downs or irritations. Gettin' work done...fast & efficiently. After having Snow Leopard on this machine, I can go back to saying "it just works" and not feel I'm saying it ironically. Also, I'm sure if Steve Jobs had anything to do with Lion, it was minimal at best. At that point, I'm assuming Tim Cook had already been running things behind the scenes before it was officially announced that he would be taking over. Steve Jobs was probably spending most of his time trying to find an alternative to dying. A person like Steve Jobs did not have a defeatist attitude and I'm sure that even if the medical professionals told him that he only had a slim chance he was spending anything and everything he had in order to find alternatives. Besides, he was the one who had to get up to shower in the mornings and see his self wasting away and quietly have that image in his mind all day at work. I doubt he was thinking about Lion and whether or not LaunchPad was a revolutionary idea. I'm sure he was thinking about his wife and kids and what they would do without him instead of micromanaging Lion or having any kind of relevant input. See the point. Don't blame Lion on Jobs, I'm sure Lion was just the beginning of the Tim Cook era. Which I am in no way impressed with. Everything that's come out has been adding fluff upon fluff instead of making things that "just work" and horrendous marketing.
Apple turned the corner on being a platform for content creation and somehow became the platform for content consumption (I'm assuming because it's more profitable) with the iPhone and now it's designs are starting to suffer from it.