To answer the question in your title, yes I disliked it when I first saw it then I used it and found I liked it.

You might want to try lxde and/or openbox. You can pretty much make them do whatever you want. Of course, it will take you ages to edit the config.xml (or whatever it's called) and write your own theme, but once you've done it, your computer will look and behave exactly as you want it to.

Personally, I find that learning how to use unity is easier.