I totally agree with you on apps over apps. But, to me, the lockscreen is not a place where too much interaction is going on. You turn it on to glance at the time or unlock the phone, that's it. So, big notifications over there make sense to me.
I really liked how Samsung did their lockscreens. Originally you would swipe the lockscreen background away and the homescreen would be below that. That was eventually scrapped. And you could/can directly unlock into the missed calls/texts, which I also liked. DashClock does it, but either the widget is minimized, which makes it no different from the status bar, or you keep it expanded and then you have an extra step to do to unlock the phone. Over the years I get the feeling that, in order to move forward, I have to loose stuff that I like,
You can see that in other things too. The new alarm no longer has an "intelligent mode" with a gentler wakeup system, the address book no longer has the option to only show contacts with phone numbers, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I really like it, it feels cooler than JB. But I'm definitely adjusting to some missing bits that I was used to having.