That honestly doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If you build a tool to make things easier to maintain, you lose much of the benefit of that if you still have to support other alternatives where you have to do everything manually. (For instance, maintaining a 100-line init script in addition to a 10-line unit file.) Asking people who care about that to do the work to maintain it seems perfectly reasonable.
> Which at some point extended to GNOME and other vital sine qua nons.
There are far more people complaining about the lack of alternatives, and far fewer people willing to actually write and maintain alternatives. It doesn't help that many of the people complaining take the attitude of "you don't really need that anyway".
RHEL5 came with one init system. RHEL6 came with another. RHEL7 comes along with yet another init system replacement.
Each of which has required software vendors who build software to run on those platforms to do non-trivial porting work. I know it's annoying the software vendors no end.
I've heard from so many end users that they can't upgrade to RHEL7 (or derivatives) because the software they need to support doesn't work with systemd yet. Stuff that makes them frustrated with both RedHat and the software vendor. Annoying your customers hardly seems the sanest business practices.
Luckily with Debian being on board, and thus Ubuntu, at least there's some incentive for vendors to work at it.
It's far more likely that the real cause is one of the many major dependency updates (6 to 7 is like a half decade jump) and the systemd mention is either an excuse or axe-grinding.
That you do not like the outcome does not mean the process was inherently flawed or incomplete.