I feel ya.
People were confused about why I bought a Mac Pro when I immediately formatted the drive and installed a dual boot of Win7/Linux. I develop .NET applications and SQL databases. I don't need or care about OSX, I just wanted the hardware. :)

That must have been some time ago, right? Every other post I've read on the internet is about people ditching MacPros for PC hardware that's better and cheaper.

HippoMan, I feel your pain. I'm nowhere near abandoning Mac for Windows or Linux, but I'm not so crazy about being unable tweak some things in Mac, and I feel leery when I see Apple making it harder for power users to change some things "under the hood". I like a walled garden, but with a couple of doors.

One of the things I was using to manage my UI was the ability to be notified programmatically when the current desktop changes, and which desktop is the current one. There used to be an Objective-C API (I think in Carbon) which supplied this functionality up through Lion, but when Mountain Lion arrived, that API disappeared. The desktop-change notification is still present, but there is no longer any way to know programmatically which desktop is the current one.

... well, I should qualify that. It's still possible to obtain that info via hacking (code injection, for example), but you can say that about just about any piece of information about the OS's state. I just got tired of working so hard to hack my own computer, simply to make it work the way I want.

I also had been using ASOC ("AppleScript-Objective-C") for quite a while, but I assure you that this desired API is not available in that environment.

Unfortunately I don't recall the specific Objective-C API I was using for that functionality up through Lion, and I don't have the code any more, because I deleted it all when I gave my Mac away.

No, it wasn't long ago at all. I abandoned my Mac in November, 2012.

Thank you. Your statement is a clear, concise summary of my own feelings about the closed architecture.

With regard to wetware, if the Mac was the only computer I ever used, then yeah, wetware reconfigurations are appropriate. However, I earn my living programming on Windows and Linux machines, and it's important to the stability of my wetware that I don't have to make significant paradigm changes when switching between the UI's of these OS's, and also of the Mac that I formerly used at home.

As I mentioned, it was (and still is) relatively straightforward to configure the UI's under Windows and Linux to behave similarly to one another. It also used to be straightforward to implement that similar UI behavior under MacOSX. However, in Lion it became harder, and under Mountain Lion, its difficulty became even more egregious.

In other words, the reason I got rid of my Mac was for the sake of my wetware's well-being.

I've run into many of those people as well. When I bought mine, I did a price comparison with Dell. The same dual-quadcore workstation (same chipset, processor speed, and as close to the same features as possible) was over $5k from Dell, as opposed to $3k for the Mac.

I got my Linux laptop from System76. It's got 4 dual-core processors, 16Gb of memory, and a 750Gb 7200 RPM disk, as well as a matte screen. Total price is $1600. I'm not sure I could even find comparable hardware in a MacBook, but even if I did, I believe that it would cost at least double that.

Very true... laptops are a completely different story. My experience really only applies to Mac Pros (which are truly what other OEM's call workstation-class PCs). MacBooks, iMacs, and even Minis are pretty expensive compared to other equivalent hardware. Mac Pros are probably the exception.