I fucking HATE Lion, really regret updating. Oh you liked Exposé? Too bad, replaced with shitty Mission Control. Oh all your favorites and stuff in Finder? yeah we made those black and white now so it's even harder to tell the difference between each item. Oh, fucking SAVE AS? Yeah we got rid of that too. Oh you plugged in a USB drive with a text file, opened the text file and edited something, then closed it without saving, expecting nothing to happen? Yeaaaah, we autosaved over your original text file without warning you at all and now you can never get it back.
Fucking ridiculous, worst update to an OS I've ever experienced.
Never used Exposé, nor Mission Control. I keep separate main apps on different desktop spaces. For example, I use iTunes in one space, my browser in another, Logic in another, Photoshop in another, and so on. It keeps everything cleaner, and I'm able to switch between them fast. The individual windows get consolidated into that space, so I don't need to go scouring through tons of windows to get to where I need to be. If I need to share windows, I just temporarily change the desktop space. It took me a bit to relearn the muscle memory because SL handled separate desktops differently than Lion, but it wasn't a big change in the way I operated.
Not sure what you mean by the favorites being harder to see. I'm assuming you mean the things like Hard Drives, Library, Networks, etc. on the sidebar in the Finder window. I don't seem to have an issue deciphering between the names, and the icons seem to be different enough to where it shouldn't be an issue.

I keep the following things here: Applications, Music, Library, Root, Public (Dropbox), Networks and Hard Drives.
For the USB stick thing, just click Revert:
Sucks that Lion didn't work out for you, though. Everyone has their personal preferences, after all.
Edit: Saw your Pixelmator comment. I've never used this application, but Photoshop has a Save As... function, and it works just like the other Save As... features. You could maybe try using that instead?