I'll do it! Debian's repos are dramatically different from Ubuntu's. While they share lineage and have a lot of similarities, you could say that about any debian based distro. It's much more accurate to say Mint is ubuntu - bs, as they're actually very close to each other. Personally I don't like the philosophies of Debian or ubuntu in terms of how they structure their repos/package versions, but they do differ. And these days, that's the majority of what differentiates a distro. The package manager, the repos, and the defaults.

I do miss it too, but I also don't think I would still enjoy it today