My nightmare is that systemd evolves towards a system like this--opaque, baroque and difficult to debug.
Jordan Hubbard already said that FreeBSD needs an systemd equivalent. OS X was the first one to get one, Windows traditionally has a general design that resembles systemd much more than any other init system. I think you are running from reality.
Give me the coolness of systemd maintained by someone that isn't impossible to work with, and i'd be all for it.
Truth to be told, the systemd community has been reported as one of the most welcoming and productive environment in the FLOSS ecosystem.
Heck, even that wouldn't be a thing if the people involved had the ability to publicly say "I was wrong on that" - but not even that happens that I've seen.
Of course they have a strong vision, and popping up proposing something that has already been discussed to death and rejected won't be the most pleasing experience ever (it happens all the time here, I don't even want to imagine how tiresome it should feel for them).
There are thankfully a few non-systemd linucies around - Gentoo, or others have mentioned Slackware.
On the other hand, the issues are also in the soft-realtime-ness, the hardware drivers, the embedded community,etc.
Indeed for Desktop or Server, *BSD might do it just fine, though many OSS development env these days are tested by default on Ubuntu/Debian etc instead of BSDs.