[chipsy]

It's political theatre, to some extent. The traditional "SysV init" mechanism is there to do things that are slightly above kernel space, but too global to be considered part of userspace; so things like user settings for power management, managing long-running daemon processes, and handling logins could all be part of the init.

The problem motivating a switch is that init is an underpowered solution for the number of things that a distribution is asked to handle these days; it results in a lot of hand-tuned scripts with duplicated effort.

Enter the politics. A lot of the value of a distribution can come down to how its init system has been built, since it means the difference between essential stuff working or not working. Systemd pushes the value and the accountability into a central location by annexing lots of different features that were traditionally just spread out amongst various interdependent scripts. There are a lot of straightforward technical advantages to centralizing some of these things(speed, simplicity of configuration, etc.), but everyone and their dog has an opinion about which things should or shouldn't be annexed, and the form in which it should be done. Many people's jobs are potentially at stake here.

The more conspiracy-minded also view systemd as a power grab from Red Hat. Red Hat's business substantially involves contracts with the military, lending circumstantial evidence to the idea that they are doing deliberate harm to serve state interests - thus everything they do is viewed with some suspicion.