Now, my impression is that some people advocating things like Gnome
and systemd here are so much "experts" and concerned with technical
details that they fail to see the overall picture and the fundamental
differences. They essentially ask the critics (of systemd in this
case) to just give in unless they have precise technical problems, in
which case they should start coding or at least report these problems
because they can all be solved, and in the end everyone can
reasonably be expected to be happy. I guess these people would also
deny that Gnome is intransparent and that it resembles MS Windows,
because everyone can look at the code, after all.
But to the user, things look quite different. Even if the user hasn't
consciously installed anything like Gnome, he will see that more and
more things are happening on his computer that he doesn't want and
doesn't understand, and that he has to spend more and more time
looking for ways to understand things, disable things and restore the
way things were done before, if that is still possible at all. And
when he digs deep enough he will often find that the reason why
something has changed for the worse is that "it's the Gnome way".
The change of initsystem has nothing to do with GNOME (even if GNOME is
using some features extensively). systemd (or upstart) is solving long
standing issues regarding starting of daemon (clean environment,
selinux context, loginuid attribute or prevents other stuff that can
leak from the user session) and daemon life cycle management (being
sure that when a service is stopped all the processes are effectively
stopped). Then systemd add other features like private /tmp directory
using namespace or socket activation. All of these features are for
servers, again nothing to do with GNOME. AND in addition to these, it
gives DE an unique API to interact with the power state of the machine
(inhibition, notification about power state changes,...) and user
session management via logind.