This classifies as another useless systemd rant. Everybody switched to that ages ago. Can every distro be wrong?
Anyway, I've been using Debian Sid since 2000 and, for what it's worth, it "just works" on my hardware now and it's much easier to install/manage than, say, five years ago. Then again, if you mess with the default configuration you're looking for trouble and should accept that problems are harder to fix for corner cases.
The distros were all wrong when they adopted hacky sysvinit configurations with things like Makefile-style concurrency, initscript headers parsed by a preprocessor just so they could get some half-assed dependency system, not modularizing their common initscript functions in library files and instead rewriting everything from scratch every script, so on and so forth. And then ignoring all the alternative init systems besides systemd and Upstart that were around well before.
I'm not saying they're wrong this time, but there's no reason why not. The haphazard state of the Linux desktop that the original author laments over might be indication they're wrong in some places.
Well it may be a bad time to start with Debian unstable, when they are switching to systemd (or are in the process of doing it).
I remember updating to Debian testing (never had the nerves for unstable) when they switched to Gnome3 and I experienced bugs (and really nasty ones). When they make big changes it is going to break things.
If you don't want to have things broken, either use a stable distribution, don't upgrade for some time or live with it.
Right now I am using Arch Linux mostly - but I've heard the change to systemd had some rough edges for Arch Linux too (didn't use it at this time).
I can say that I am completely fine with systemd on Arch Linux and I don't understand the big problem some people have with it (on a philosphical level I do understand them, but not on a pragmatic level).
Anyway, I've been using Debian Sid since 2000 and, for what it's worth, it "just works" on my hardware now and it's much easier to install/manage than, say, five years ago. Then again, if you mess with the default configuration you're looking for trouble and should accept that problems are harder to fix for corner cases.