Makes me think of Linux Mint (at least Mate, Xfce). Technically you can add many themes but there's very little, almost nothing installed by default.
This is because GTK3 themes break constantly every time Gnome does a little update to GTK3, so when you upgrade your OS to a new version hell might break loose.
Also, Mate sends you to a website (gnome-look) that lists GTK3 and GTK2 themes. Wtf? I obviously want a theme that works on both. Do GTK3 themes bundle a GTK2 theme? I don't know. I don't feel like experimenting let alone do a survey of my apps to know which use GTK2 and which use GTK3.

Cinnamon does have a new website up (Cinnamon Spices) which looks greats : useful themes and applets, good site design. I would only run Cinnamon on powerful hardware w/ advanced and properly working graphics driver though.

I will consider using the gasoline engine to generate electricity, and use that electricity to power an electric boiler that powers a steam engine that will power big fan blades that will blow air on a sail :)

Yes and no.
Microsoft still thinks USB-A is the normal for instance.
I will compare it to consumer electronics moving over the decades from dual RCA to 3.5mm jack. This doesn't change the basic feature of getting sound in or out, except for a few special jacks like headphone + mic on the same jack or non standard playback controls.

And if you get a DJ mixer or an AV receiver etc., it's still full of RCA inputs!
Tho in fairness, nobody really cares.

My other point is contrary to the 90s, a computer isn't a rare thing that's obsoleted after three years, same for the peripherals. So "regular" (non ultrabooks) laptops might keep USB-A for the next decade and desktops might as well keep at least two forever. Desktops still have PS/2 and DVI, because people want to plug their cable or peripheral in. They aren't excited by the idea of their cable not fitting in.

Or to continue the audio analogy, people don't replace their amplifier because it still has a turntable (phono) input.

OEM desktops don't have PS/2 as they come with keyboard + mouse, aftermarket motherboards have PS/2 ; in the 90s, the OEM had PS/2 while the piecemeal desktops used DIN for the keyboard and COM port for the mouse, before adopting PS/2.
So, everybody could end up using only USB-C but this will take long and it is less likely due to everything using USB-A, not just some old keyboard, bad mouse or 28800 bps modem.

I know you're well intentioned and a crappy Android device might be not much to many people.

Yet I can't refrain from this.
What if you're toilet is completely clogged, all your toilets are unworkable but you need to take a dump?

Workaround :

1. Buy your neighbor's house.
2. Kick them out.
3. When you want to take a crap, go to your new house next door.
4. Keep using your original house for all other purposes.

You will need a monitor with a display in and a display out - effectively bundling the "dongle" into the monitor. That's not a universal solution. You might be likely to find it on a recent high end Dell monitor for instance, and use the monitor's USB 3.0 hub if also available. So in a case like that you'll do fine with no dongle or dock or kind of hub crawling on the desk without needing either Thunderbolt or USB-C.

Great!, if your monitor is recent enough and/or of a high enough market segment.

I think you're guaranteed 5 volts, 3 amps power on it so the benefit would be your PC can act as a decent power supply for a USB-C phone.

That's there is to it I think. If you let a cable hang from the PC and like to plug a (suitable) phone in for mass storage access or only for charging, you'll not be stuck at 500 milliamps or ~ 1 amp.

That you miss out on 10 Gbps is a shame but it's meaningless for hard drives and you can bet cheap flash drives will only support 5 Gbps. You pretty much need a PCIe SSD in your PC, and a fast external drive that's in practice an external SSD (thumb sized or not) to copy at 900MB/s or whatever the 10 Gbps (3.1 Gen 2) will allow.
You can also get a USB-C mouse, freeing up one USB-A port for something else!

I once attempted to copy data between two USB2 drives (perhaps two hard drives, so fast in both read/write) on a USB1 computer (only two ports so sharing a single controller).

It was hilariously slow, as both ports shared (I believe) a theoretical 12Mbit/s bandwith, plus overhead, plus overhead of both working at the same time. But it was not incompatible. Worked just fine actually, as long as you were ready to wait hours for a gigabyte to copy.

I think that's the point. With USB A, you have the same connector on a $1000 whateverbook or a $300 whateverbook or a $200 whateverbook.
No need to spend $1000 in dad's money or student debt money or 100 hours of summer job money only to have to faff around with incompatible storage drives and peripherals.

How about not wasting a ton of RAM? Unused reserved RAM (Virtualbox is not a super advanced bare metal hypervisor), duplicate disk caches, further waste of storage such as a virtual swap partition for the VM.
Now think about all the young devs and even old farts using a laptop some of them with 8GB RAM max (8GB is the new 2GB, thanks to software bloat and the javascript web)

If you have to provide power input support on both a proprietary connector (or non-proprietary round DC plug) and USB-C, that complicates your electrical floor plan or power circuitry, on a device where space and cost are the biggest concerns.

If you only have one USB-C and no other power input port, then you can't even charge and plug one peripheral in at the same time (mouse, USB drive, etc.)
although your power brick might contain a USB hub in which case you might plug your mouse on the power brick that might sit on the floor. Duh!

If you have two USB-C ports, you have to make them both power input ports, driving up cost and complexity, or you might support power input on one of them and not the other, which the user will have trouble understanding and the user will be pissed at plugging things on the wrong port.

I think what I describe is about what's only really wrong with USB-C. You see USB-C only on phones (which only have one USB port that always accept charging) and high end laptops $1000 and up (or at the back of high end motherboards where a tiny connector doesn't bring much beside compatibility proofing with USB-C only devices)

Indeed ; a hermaphrodite connector would have been a lot more impressive!

Um, when there are small lightning bolts printed next to the USB-C ports (Zeus' divine weapon) does that mean TB support or power input support? lol.

I can know it or find a way to know it (okay, I know it's TB and won't unknow it for a while). It strikes me (eh!) as a fairly silly choice of symbol since I suppose most people will think it means "electricity".

The tradition on laptops was to have two jacks, one for input and one for output.

But Compaq and Gateway didn't decide in 1994 to change all their serials ports to RJ45 while everyone else kept using of DB9, pissing off people who couldn't plug their shit in anymore.

It's a nuclear site from the 1940s when people didn't seem to exactly care about what they were doing. Might be another 4000 years or so of job security.