The only people who actually have the high ground in the "muh unix, do one thing" argument are people who use a microkernel and never use any web browsers, text editors or any programs at all. No actual Unix has ever had anything but a monolithic kernel anyway, which flies in the face of the twisted, extreme "Unix philosophy" the anti-systemd zealots claim to support.

Some of these anti-systemd people actually seem reasonable until they bring out these sorts of arguments. Actually reasonable criticisms I've seen are:

• Not portable (although, like you said, this is pretty much necessary, unless everyone implements all of the features of Linux)
  
• Some daemons can be swapped out, some can't (you have to use journald) - bad for choice, I suppose. But then again http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-de...00861.html, but then again does that email actually prove anything other than the skill with which the author can make analogies?
  
• The devs aren't nice?
  

It gets pretty hard after a while to think of arguments that apply to everyone. There's always the "sysvinit/openrc/runit is better for me" argument, but obviously, that's not a real argument, since it's just personal preference.

It's worth mentioning that there are idiots on the other side of the systemd fence too. I was once arguing with someone about X11 and he told me to open up top and tell me what user my X server was running as. I told him "_x11". But that's clearly impossible unless you have systemd to let you turn water into wine and have your laptop walk on water.

Whatever I or anyone else thinks, I still don't understand why this issue is so polarising. Everyone either hates or loves systemd. It's even worse than vi vs Emacs, because at least that debate involved actual discussions of the programs involved rather than non-technical "philosophical" debates. Actually, you know what, there are a lot of Vim zealots arguing on the internet nowadays, I might have to take that one back.