Agreed. It includes a huge set of tools needed by admins dealing with fundamental stuff such as routing and firewalling. I guess people bashing it are more into higher application layers.

Having pf, bgpd, ospfd, isakmpd etc. included in base for systems I administer are crucial for my daily tasks, while I couldn't care less for node.js. But application developers not dealing with network stuff probably have the opposite needs.

It's not about "which OS is better" but about "which tool is appropriate for the job".