I’ll only speak for myself, but Lubuntu is a Ubuntu project, part of the Ubuntu family, so we can’t go off in ways we decide would best suit us - we must comply with Ubuntu’s aims. I don’t see this as a disadvantage though; we get huge benefits being part of a larger family!
Does Ubuntu force decisions on us; in my view No. In the recent (or current) flatpak clafluffle (probably not a real word; from a recent West Wing episode I watched) I very much disagree with a lot of what has been written about, and have said so in the odd place (eg. here) but the Flatpak ‘change’ involved no change for us so was somewhat easy.
There are always disagreements where many people are involved, always different directions individuals want the project to move; so consensus needs to be reached & Ubuntu is a large community, made up of smaller communities with Lubuntu being one of those.
The Lubuntu team think and talk about many things, but lack of resources (time, energy, people) are the major blocks that are generally experienced.
Lubuntu 18.04 LTS & LXDE releases had an easy means to allow you to snap windows (see here) with efforts to make that work out of the box on LXQt releases more than once… but that requires time/energy & attempts haven’t yet achieved it (lack of resources being the biggest hurdle!).
Lubuntu lunar is already in feature freeze, so work on that has pretty much completed (excluding bug fixing of course), but that’s still our short term focus (for me I’m somewhat spent having just got jammy.2 out)