You can't argue with Poettering. He writes technically superior solutions for extremely edge-case problems and then markets them fiercely, dismissing people as stupid if they prefer the caveman's way [e.g. UNIX]. To disagree is to say you prefer a kludgy unintelligent mess. Which, we do. But you don't win points in a feature-comparison pissing contest for that.

Theo is basically who Poettering would be if he forked Linux (and was less whiny). He probably hasn't because it would be a ton of work and few people would use it, and he couldn't benefit from the base of support of the Linux ecosystem. There's a lot of crap out there that's Linux-only now, or officially only supports certain distros. It makes much more sense to convince someone to shoehorn your code into their distro than to make your own.

Few desktop users ever notice it, most server admins aren't really that knowledgeable, and most devs just write userland code. I think most people don't think about how much more of a headache things have become. After all, hasn't Linux/UNIX always been a headache, relatively speaking?