[pessimizer]

To be fair, the people reacting like this are reacting because they think that pulseaudio, gnome, and systemd have been damaging to the linux desktop community. Even though you're characterizing them as "a few paid developers and a bunch of enthusiast volunteers," they're representing a few large companies (or mainly one in particular) that have the weight to push through their opaque designs into upstream distributions, even when they don't quite work yet.

You may admire them for the challenges they've undertaken, but many wish they had either come up with more transparent/unixy solutions to those challenges, or instead had taken up others, like chess or rock-climbing.

That being said, systemd and pulseaudio have reached a point of stability for me, which is good, because unlike most other things on my system, there's no way I could fix a problem that came up without a support contract.