As an additional point: in the spectrum between centralization and decentralization, there's a clear difference between Linux and FreeBSD. This is what I highlighted in my post: FreeBSD's greater degree of centralization seems to me to be more efficient and leading to a better integration. That much is a correct observation.
But I did not want to imply that "decentralization equals less choice". As an example: Android is as centralized as you can get for an open source project. That does not stop people from customizing it to bits, so much that it's barely recognizable as Android anymore. The beauty however is that people can do that without influencing the direction of the original project (although that happens to a limited and uncredited degree), or bitching and moaning about it.
That's a fair point. When I wrote "centralization" I mainly meant components rather than development model. Systemd is very "centralized" in that a single package does a lot, but Linux as a whole is very decentralized in development model. BSDs are "centralized" in the sense that they have a single tree in source control, but the main result is a rather small, very configurable base system. (Then you deal with ports and packages on top, which feels more like a Linux distro: scripts that pull distfiles from lots of different sites and apply patches; not unlike the experience of building a .deb from source.)
Linux isn't quite in this world in such a dramatic way as the BSDs, but it exists very close to it.
So "choice" isn't some abstract concept that comes later as an afterthought, it's kind of the whole point in a very concrete and literal sense, in a way that other systems do not offer. Naturally you will see people with their workflows based on that, or some indirect form of that. And these people have working systems, no matter how much people wax philosophical and longingly on forums for "missing" features that are irrelevant to people with already working systems.
So from a certain perspective it's a bit weird to see something like a slide here say that such a system needs to address 99% of people. Who says? It's working fine in its niche.
I think there is also a very simple difference of opinion and difference in personality types here, in a way that I don't often see people acknowledge. On one side you have people who crave authority, order, centralization. One component to manage boot and hardware. One UI toolkit. Choice is bad, freedom is slavery. (OK, just joking on that last one.) Then there are people who just happen to like it the other way. I'm glad that some systems don't bring up a GUI until I ask for one, and even then, it can be whatever I say it is. I find it pleasingly simple that the OpenBSD upgrade instructions basically tell you to run tar and patch. These things are an anathema to those whose personality types are more aligned with, say, OS X, but they work well for me.