Because who wouldn't want their home directory to be managed by the init system? It's $CURRENT_YEAR after all!!
> So why should Linux really care about compatibility with “niche” operating systems that are in the end anyway going to do their own thing? And for that matter, why should we still care about Unix altogether?
To me this is the most offensive thing about systemd
It's actually quite funny, but authorized key file path was configurable since forever in opensshd (check out /etc/ssh/sshd_config or similar, I use that on my systems with ecryptfs encrypted homes since that feature was added to Ubuntu ~10 years ago): the only trick is to make sure files are owned by appropriate users if you want them to have control over it and I set it to something like "/etc/ssh/users/%u".
Right, my life isn't complete without the ability to seamlessly mount my homedir on any public toilet!
Also, surely you've noticed how this is paving the way toward systemd-sshd...