Another part of the problem is that people feel that systemd is being forced on them (more so than the usual "my distro switched to X, so I'm stuck using X").

Another part of the problem is that people feel that systemd is being forced on them (more so than the usual "my distro switched to X, so I'm stuck using X"). The major issue right now is systemd-logind, a replacement for the unmaintained ConsoleKit daemon which is used to manage login sessions. logind provides functionality that is necessary for modern desktop environments, but it's designed to work only with the systemd init daemon. GNOME in particular has been talking about adding a hard dependency on logind, and once that happens the only choice of init system for people running GNOME will be systemd.