Dan, what I got from reading the article you reference...:

From: Dan Ritter <dsr <at> randomstring.org> Subject: embrace, extend, extinguish Newsgroups: gmane.linux.debian.user Date: 2014-09-01 17:26:09 GMT (3 hours and 9 minutes ago)

Reading: http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html

systemd's upstream is explicitly interested in taking over all Linux distros, not in the minor sense of being supported on every system but in the major sense of making package management conform to their own views.

...is that among other things redhat people never grokked the true value of a versioned library package naming policy (like Debian, openSUSE, among other distro's use, hence demonstrating the core concept works as well for rpm as for dpkg based systems), and hence keep finding need to re-invent even more complex layers to solve these same fundamental issues that debian, opensuse, and similar distros already had already solved through such polices long ago with far greater efficiency and far less duplication of libraries and code everywhere for each and every vendor than this madness would involve. The lack of a logical and versioned library package naming scheme is also what always had made Fedora in particular painful and unreliable to upgrade. I do not think the problem is some evil cabal mad to take over the world, but rather simply a bit of ignorance mixed with a strong nih syndrome.