I'd seen a little of the controversy in the Linux world over systemd, but hadn't formed an opinion. Mac OS X has launchd which seems to work well. Systemd seems like a similar concept.
After installing and configuing Fedora 20, though, I've now got some scars from fighting with systemd. Systemd can't seem to start ypbind, who knows why, so NIS doesn't come up on a reboot. The default error log messages are useless; you have to ask for the long form of the log messages before you can find out what went wrong. For some reason, ssh takes forever (like 10 or 15 minutes) to get to the point of allowing logins; an attempt before then hangs after connecting to sshd but before running the login code. So I am starting to understand some of the frustration folks have with systemd.
I also grok the feaping creaturism of systemd, but in its defense I have to say that on a system that is crazy enough to have an out-of-memory killer, running as init is the only way to make sure a critical service stays up.