A lot of projects have dependencies on other projects. Systemd provides a lot of very useful functionality. So it's going to be depended upon. But actually it's

A lot of projects have dependencies on other projects. Systemd provides a lot of very useful functionality. So it's going to be depended upon. But actually it's pretty layered. Systemd provides things to activate NTP. That can either call timesync or any other daemon. To me, these very simple daemons are for minimal install purposes. So "cloud" and embedded. Once the OS has systemd, it'll be easy to bootup (dhcp, ntp, etc all working for the simple cases). Various parts of Linux do weird things. Workaround bugs from other projects. While we have the source and should just fix the bugs where they are. As I mentioned in another comments, UNIX and BSD have everything in one repository. Develop things together, ensure that stuff works nicely together. That's how I see what systemd is starting to make happen.