I'm not a systemd hater per se. After all, the problems it aims to solve are real problems worth solving. I just can't agree with their strategy on how they've gone about solving those problems. There are plenty of reasons why I'm not interested in systemd (see my sig for just a few of them) but I suppose the main problem I have with it is how everything is tightly coupled together. It's either their way or you can bugger off. For decades reliable systems have been built on the idea that components should be loosely coupled together (this is part of what Unix philosophy is all about). This idea still runs true today, just look at Amazon's recommendations for building a cloud infrastructure or look at how the architecture of a modern web browser has changed to become more secure and reliable. systemd throws this idea out of the window. They currently plan to make systemd a hard dependency on udev and I just cannot agree with that stance.

Perhaps an integrated solution like systemd is the best way forward for those that want to see Linux compete with Windows for greater desktop market share but "the year of Linux on the desktop" is not something that interests me. I'd rather see Linux become more like Plan 9 than go in the opposite direction in order to become a Windows replacement.