It also ended up being tightly coupled, with poorly documented APIs and major bugs, which drew the ire of some longer-term professionals.
I don't think the idea systemd shim layer of services is necessarily bad, but I do think that having its design and implementation centralized within Red Hat isn't the best ; it would be nice if there was a complement to the Linux foundation doing its development, as having the process be managed by someone as competent as respected as Linus would go a long way into quieting the storm around it.
oh don't be silly.
systemd's development is not centralized at all.
it's LGPL licensed and its developent happens on github at https://github.com/systemd/systemd -- anybody is free to fork it off to another project -- yet pretty much nobody does, how comes that?
I am not surprised I had to actually sit down and go through a short course on systemd and read some of the manpages to understand it enough and profit off its presence.