I remember watching this video and Poettering's argument were very sound and he has managed to repel most (if not all) Draxinger's points.

The problem with "it's not the UNIX way" argument is that a lot of people don't care about UNIX that much, they just want a good system. Poettering mentions in that video that all his, and his colleagues' work (pulseaudio, consolekit, udev into udisks/upower) has been done because there was an actual demand for those features. There is a reason why most distributions use their work even as people complain about them.