To all the programmers saying they don't want to spend their time building their own desktops:
My point isn't that people in general should be hacking up their own Linux desktops, even if they can. Programmers that like to do that probably should though.
My point is that if you are going to commit to using user-oriented systems like GNOME/KDE, don't do non-standard things and don't complain because system internals seem too complicated. They aren't meant to be hackable/simple!
don't do non-standard things and don't complain because system internals seem too complicated
This is a false contradiction. You can have a system with a user-friendly default configuration (for developers) and that is still understandable and hackable.
In fact, this is the entire premise of UNIX: it consists of small orthogonal programs that you can combine in various ways to solve problems. E.g. remember the old script-driven hotplug[1]. It was user-oriented: users did not have to add manual modprobe stanzas to some file anymore or manually mount USB sticks. On the other hand, it was a set of shell scripts that could be modified easily by anyone with some basic grasp of bourne shell scripting.
[1] Which had the problem of being slow due to requiring a lot of fork/execs.
It's not a false contradiction (dichotomy?). In general, non-standard modifications can break the default configuration, even in your hotplug example. If they can break the default configuration, I'm simply saying don't complain when they do.
The OP is running GNOME and complaining because he's not using systemd and it broke something (non-standard configuration) and because he can't understand the d-bus-controlled cgroups system (complicated system internals).
My point isn't that people in general should be hacking up their own Linux desktops, even if they can. Programmers that like to do that probably should though.
My point is that if you are going to commit to using user-oriented systems like GNOME/KDE, don't do non-standard things and don't complain because system internals seem too complicated. They aren't meant to be hackable/simple!