I'm running Mint (Gloria), and there's a tiny bit of truth in what you are
saying. There's one quirk in my system which I would like to eliminate,
although it doesn't seem to cause any real problems. I'm not sure if it's
actually due to Mint.

I completely ignore the "Mintness" of my system, and treat it as a standard
Ubuntu installation. That is working out fine for me. I've got Ubuntu Server
running in a VirtualBox...