"Then stop poisoning the well."

I've dithered on whether or not to respond, but this bugs me.

Your response, again, typically of many systemd supporters, looks at the option of responding to the relevant points of my argument (personalities can have relevant technical consequences), and dives to the personality dispute "stop poisoning the well".

I'm not poisoning the well. I'm pointing out that the well has been poisoned.

The elements of the Unix philosophy which you allude to exist for good reasons, and violating them imposes very high costs. This is a lesson that those of us who've been around for a while, and have multi-platform experience (check on both counts for myself) are well aware of.

Monolithic systems transcend ready replacement. Generally you've got to toss the whole mess out. Pluggable systems avoid that. There are instances in which monolithic design does seem to be at the very least hard to avoid, but you'd best be very aware of this and defend your position well. Systemd violates this principle by assuming gratuitous monolithic nature and explicitly refusing compatibility and modular alternatives.

Tightly-coupled systems are similarly brittle. The classic case of this is probably the Windows platform as a whole. Among the best arguments for loose coupling comes from Steve McConnell's 1990s classic Code Complete (ironically, McConnell was a Microsoft developer). I strongly recommend you read the relevant sections on tight vs. loose coupling.

Binary logs (and binary file formats in general) preclude use of alternative tools. The Windows Registry (again from Microsoft) comes to mind. One of the better hacks of this I know of are Unix/Linux compatibility systems which treat the registry as a filesystem interface. This originated with UWIN (from Steve Korn of AT&T and Korn shell fame), and has since been adopted by Cygwin. The ability to grep the registry, process it with scripting tools (sed, awk, perl, etc.), and modify it (using specific commandline utilities offered for the purpose) makes dealing with that particular hairball _slightly_ less annoying. The lack of self-documenting formats for registry values themselves (a trait shared by GNOME's gconf system) is another fatal flaw.

Even packaging formats are subject to this. Red Hat (gee ... aren't they involved with systemd....) designed a binary file format for RPM which requires specific tools to unpack. Joey Hess's 'alien' links to the RPM libraries for this purpose, and a set of Perl tools I'm aware of has to apply specific offsets (varying by RPM version) to extract data from the files. Contrast this with Debian's DEB format: tarballs packed in an ar archive. This can be unpacked with standard shell tools, or busybox.

Putting together the concepts of monolithic, loosely coupled, non-binary, standard tools, I've more than once rescued Debian systems which failed to pivot-root from initrd by breaking into the initrd shell, unpacking, and installing DEB packages using shell tools, facilitated by the use of an interactive shell, busybox for tools, and the DEB format. I'm thwarted on several levels from a similar recovery option in Red Hat systems due to the use of a special and explicitly noninteractive shell used in initrds (which is larger than Debian's 'dash' used for the same role), and the binary format of RPM packages. Working in cramped quarters and difficult situations, I can assure you of which system I'd prefer to be working with.

Systemd's violation of these principles is objectionable because it's not necessary (see OpenBSD's shim replacement for functionality, or uselessd, among others), gratuitous (decisions are being deliberately made), and, as your comment above illustrates, the very valid reasons for not doing just this are belittled.