Maybe you are the problem. I don't know a single OSS developer that is more hated than you. Ever wondered why this might be?
Lennart's complaints about Linus are on point here. But not for the reason Lennart thinks.
Linus has scathing personal insults. And people don't hate him. Because most of the time... he's right. Linus has gotten where he is through brains, a lot of work, and a certain amount of luck. His code has been adopted through sheer technical merit.
Lennart has written a lot of code, but the perception is that much of it was adopted for political reasons. This adoption goes directly against the core principles of the Open Source movement.
i.e. people feel emotionally betrayed.
In contrast, Linus telling them to go fuck themselves is just strong wording around a technical discussion. It doesn't hit emotional buttons in the same way.
The "feature creep" of systemd is another case in point. Systemd is increasing it's functionality, and forcing people to use it. Because the alternatives are no longer supported, or their favorite software is now welded to systemd. This process hits more emotional buttons.
The perception is that Open Source is about freedom, personal choice, etc. When people have choices removed in Open Source software, it hits emotional buttons. When they get told "my way or the highway", they get deeply offended on a personal level.
Lennart may be right in all of his technical decisions. But the environment he's in means he's guaranteed to get a lot of flak for it.
After reading this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd , I dislike systemd also. The conspiracy side of my mind think redhead is pushing for systemd because systemd's complexity enable redhead to sale more support contracts.
If there's one thing people hate more than having flaws pointed out in something they like, it's someone else changing that thing and making it better. Not only does it feel like an insult, but it means that all that pain you went through to learn bash/xfree86.conf/ifconfig/alsactl/etc. is now irrelevant.
I don't see how you can seriously argue against systemd. The lack of integration and modernity in desktop linux has hurt it. Does no-one remember how much of a pain in the arse it was to simply connect to a WPA2 wifi network for years? That was because wifi configuration was a jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts - not something that is easy to interface to a GUI. We should be celebrating the fact that someone is fixing the mess that is the linux userspace.
Anyway, none of this justifies the stupid amount of hatred inflicted on him. And I've still yet to see a sane technical criticism of systemd.
Also, you won't believe how many times an "alsactl restore" has ended up fixing my audio, even on systems with PulseAudio.