Please continue to ship a Pop without Cosmic
I honestly doubt this will reach the doorstep of the devs, but I wanted to throw my voice out there. If I'm wrong about this, I'm sure someone will let me know quickly: there doesn't seem to be an option to leave Pop 22.04 without adopting Cosmic.
Edit: Just in case there's some misunderstanding, I'm not saying "stop shipping with Cosmic", I'm saying provide the option to not have to deal with it.
I want to start by saying that I have loved and recommended Pop ever since 2021. It was the first Ubuntu based distro that I found to work excellently out of the box for coding, streaming, gaming and other general office purposes. Snappy and responsive, though certainly wanting for customization options out of the box.
I get "the dream" for Cosmic, and I think that from a purely visual standpoint, it is fantastic... But that's about it. The Cosmic replacements for the tried and true GNOME apps are needless and often frustrating. They work adequately, but there's little changes here and there that make them infuriating to use.
The desktop environment does not seem to have a way to allow the user to move the icons on the desktop, in dual (and presumably more) monitor setups, the contents of the desktop are copied on both screens even when the display style is "extend", and there are various other gripes and complaints that pop up every now and again that make it feel as if Cosmic is absolutely not out of beta. I'll also include that the update to 24.04 also failed at some indeterminate point, forcing me to install from scratch - I didn't suffer much data loss from this, but its worth pointing out. To mention a few other issues: file transfer between mounted discs is slow and often reports a failure (even if there is no sign of that failure in the copy) and some apps, especially flatpaks do not play nicely with the taskbar (clicking the open, minimized app will open a cloned instance of the app, closing the clone closes both)
I'm sure there's a level of pride that comes with having made Cosmic and indeed it's worth being proud of, but as it stands in my honest opinion, it weighs Pop down. If having to replace the desktop environment with Cosmic is the only way to continue getting distro releases with Pop, I doubt I'm the only person who will decide to pick a different distro. It doesn't seem like it would be a tremendous burden to offer Pop with different desktop environments like Mint and Fedora offer.