i think you're reading too far into it. not to mention no one was "bitching" before you came in and dramarama'd it up. i never really got the hang of duping, but i accepted stuff from fireslash gladly simply because it was available. it's not available now, so now i'm stopping.
if you want the game to look nicer, you probably should play a game where all the visuals aren't built out of 1m cubed blocks
notch has stated that the flowers will be used for dyes in the future. just wait until it's fixed, and you'll be set. until then, get creative! there are a lot more colors than gray and brown. cactus and mossy cobble gives you green blocks. glass - and water/ice, if you can wrangle it - gives you clear and blue. obsidian is that purplish color. the only color you're really missing is red and orange, and bookshelves and some paintings look red from a distance.
saying that you're going to dupe everything isn't necessarily a good idea, considering that the people running the server have requested that you NOT do it in order to maintain the stability of the server. a better option would be to make something useful and trade for other people's stuff. i'd happily trade you stuff if you wanted it. but you just seem convinced that the only way to play the game is to break it. if you so desperately want to build stuff, play creative mode. you can get as much of everything as you could ever want, without too much hassle.