"Ignore advanced web developers complaining about ‘not another Bootstrap website’" I agree. It's your customers that matter. And unless you're building a product for advanced web developers, pleasing them should be no matter to you.
I've shown Bootstrap sites to non-developers and the response is usually that the sites look nice. Never has it been "ug. boostrap?".
We run the resource page listed in the article [1] and as a result of that it is quite possible I've looked at more sites built with Bootstrap than even the creators.
From this I've really found two things:
One, I think there is some massive confirmation bias at work. If a site customizes Bootstrap and it looks nice nobody credits it as a 'Bootstrap Looking' site, so as a result it is only when the defaults are used that people really pick up on it.
Second, the alternative to a site built with Bootstrap is typically not a beautiful custom designed front end, but a pretty rough looking unstyled, inconsistent mess.
Bootstrap is the new baseline for what a website should look like, it should be customized, it can be improved but there is now zero excuse for it looking worse.
Ugh. Really. Hate the fonts (Mainly the bold condensed ones). Hate the color scheme(Yellow text on a grey-green background? Seriously? It actually looks reasonable with the colors inverted[cmd-option-control-8 on OSX]). Slow to load, at least the first time. And socialist realism posters have very bad connotations, no matter how hiply ironic you find them.
I've shown Bootstrap sites to non-developers and the response is usually that the sites look nice. Never has it been "ug. boostrap?".