My only issue with mint is that it is downstream of Ubuntu so I feel like the maintainers have to spend too much effort fixing kinks and bypassing Canonical's dumb ideas.
LMDE is cool too, but then its too stable and doesn't have all the nice UI features of regular mint lol.
I find it amusing and interesting that a heap of people work hard to create Debian, then a bunch of other people build on it to create Ubuntu, then a third group of people do a heap of additional work to wind back some of the changes to create Mint.