I don't get the hate. I use gmail and roundcube (on a cPanel host) on a daily basis. cPanel hosting is really easy to use and maintain. With a good hosting company, what's the issue?
cPanel has the security reputation of pre-3.0 Wordpress. It's a real-world, actual problem; in a shared hosting environment, cPanel adds a lot of risk for your customers.
cPanel is popular, and it solves a lot of problems for a lot of people. Because it's so common, people who don't otherwise know their way around web hosting can feel right at home when using cPanel. I don't have some kind of irrational, hipster-esque or elitist hatred for it; I simply think that I can't in good conscience install it and knowingly put my hosting customers at risk.
There's nothing to get, the hate is completely irrational. Those who belittle shared hosting, or the idea of cPanel have their head so far up their own tech-infused ass that they don't understand most people, hell even most techies don't want to manage their own web or email server.
It's a user interface instead of a semantic interface—you're stuck with clicking around to maintain your site and your hands are tied with your ability to actually change something about it.
Examples of a semantic interface, or changes that a "normal" person would make to their hosting that cPanel doesn't allow would be good to illustrate your point.
