There's a big difference between Canonical, who runs Ubuntu, and Trisquel.
Canonicial puts a lot of effort into taking the Debian repositories and making them stable for Ubuntu. These Ubuntu repositories are also used by Ubuntu deriatives like Linux Mint and Trisquel. The big difference is that Linux Mint uses the Ubuntu repositories directly and Trisquel takes the Ubuntu ones and cleans them out for non-free packages.
Canonical is not "dictatorship" because it is a company and not a one man show. On top of that, you don't have to use the main Ubuntu OS and there are many deriatives (like Linux Mint) that only use Ubuntu as a base and add their own changes. They provide an excellent base and large choice of packages to use.
The problem with Trisquel is that there's an extra effort to sanitize Ubuntu to make it fit into the FSF's guidelines on what a true free operating system is. Its just that one guy who handles the project and thinks he can do it alone. It would be fine and dandy if this was his full time job, but it isn't. He has a full time job working for another company and Trisquel is only maintained in the free time he has from that.
There was a point where Trisquel felt more active and moving to LTS releases was going to soften the blow on the maintenance on this project. I truely champion them for keeping it stable, but they also need to keep the people that use it secure by keeping the repositories up to date.
