LXDE based Lubuntu struck the perfect balance (for me) between:
- Being minimal and lightweight
- but works out of the box with enough batteries included
- tons of community resources due to being a ~buntu
- very, very customizable (I love my undecorated windows and no bullshit shortcuts/decorations etc)
- sane user experience, without any unnecessary bloat
- LTS support (albeit shorter than other ~buntu releases).
Yes, I can achieve these things some other way, but Lubuntu hit this sweet spot out of the box with minimal tweaking.
Maybe LXQt will be great, may be not, but at this point it reminds me of Ubuntu 10.10 which, IMHO, was as refined as Ubuntu (or any linux distro at the time) could be, and then they just decided to throw all that maturity and refinement away and start from scratch.
I truly hope LXQt based Lubuntu succeeds, but it's a sad day to me.