Going against the "divide et impera" principle, "do just one thing, and do it well", "everything is a text file" (configurations and logs) and "pipes" which are very natural idiom,
in a UNIX-like system which has been built upon these principles, is just bad engineering, shallow understanding and, perhaps, too high ambitions of knowing better how to fix what isn't broken.
The question why do we have this project and why there is such a buzz is more interesting.
But the answers doesn't belong to realms of system design or engineering, they are in more obscure notions of "business strategies" and "sales techniques".
It is a text-book example how to sell - "show them that they have a problem they didn't realize before, and give them the one and only fix". Fine. Except that the problem doesn't exist outside discussions of "why this product is good - it solves this and that".
Another thing is that it is an excellent strategy to "create a niche for oneself". Look, we are the ones who give you a solution (to a problem which doesn't exist). We are "world leader" - look, we have lots of experts, web-presence, lines of code.
There are so many examples in "parallel worlds", beginning with eco products or "fair-trade" coffee, you name it.
But you see, lots of people don't need an eco or environmental-friendly daemon which does everything "the right way". No, thank you.
Another thing, back to system design. If Windows has "registry" and there are millions copies of Windows everywhere, or Mac has that settings daemon (from which GNOME Gsettings has been copied) it doesn't mean that these design decisions are superior to plain old text configs. You could compile them and have an "intermediate storage" to gain a 5% more efficiency for application startup times, but this is, again, not a fundamental problem. Being able to use regular expressions on configuration and logs without any restriction are much more fundamental. And memorizig all the details of all these xxxxctl insted of saying something like
$ grep -R ^sysctl /etc
or whatever I need, is just an additional unnecessary burden.
Most of the problems systemd is trying to "solve" does not exist. At least not BSD, AIX, Solaris, you name it. And, of course, there never been any problem with syslog, init or cron. They were *good-enough".