It's sad that people resigned over it but the pain itself seems unavoidable from where I'm sitting.

If there's enough time and energy in the community to be throwing death threats around, surely there is enough energy to maintain debian/systemd and debian/upstart as separate distros, both of which live happily ever after, sharing the 99.999% of code and infrastructure that they have in common? Then if one side really IS technically superior, people will naturally end up moving to that one and the other will die a gentle natural death, no personal attacks and resignations needed.

(For example, see what happened when Canonical wanted Debian to be more apple-like -- they didn't send death threats to Debian developers, they just did the work that they wanted to see done, and now both projects are a great success)

There's some strife at both levels, the level of discourse is quite a bit different as is the level of publicity, and the level of actual impact.

You could be correct about modern culture and public non participant trolling culture. But there are more groups involved than just that (loud) group.

Dude ...

Of course English being not my mother tongue I didn't have enough vocabulary to express my distress at the mental picture that exploded in my brain when I read those words.

I thought "dude" conveyed best my disgust, puzzlement and amazement :-)

I don't hate you though.