Anyone who had a Droid X especially the Verizon variant can remember the outrage you felt when you realized it didn't include an unlocked bootloader. Not only did it not have an unlocked bootloader it also had an E-Fuse. For a long time it was believed that if this E-Fuse was blown by tinkering your device would be damaged for good with a voided warranty. It turned out to pretty much just void your warranty.
For months the community held out hope that the bootloader would one day be unlocked. In the meantime Koush developed a version of ClockworkMod recovery that did not require your phone to be bootloader unlocked. It essentially bypassed the bootloader all together. The only issue with this is that you could not run an AOSP rom. You had to run a rom based on the Droid X stock rom.
Many developers did their very best to fancy up Moto Blur. For the most part these roms were extreme deviations from Blur. They covered the skin with a skin! These roms made our phones look and feel different and also sped things up with tweaks and mods. One rom however sought to bring a more stock like experience to the Droid X.
The APEX rom by developer "Fabulous" aka Andrew Xie was based on Motorola's build of Android. It was stripped of most Blur components. Only essential Blur pieces were left. The rom included some extras like the Nexus S Live Wallpaper, themed Gmail/Email/Music Notifications, Lots of performance scripts, GingerBread theme, custom transition animations and more! This was one heck of a rom. I used it as my daily driver rom quite a bit.