I think the driving point no one wants to argue about and therefore has been lapdancing around, is one way or another systemd is developed by a very ambitious company.
Not even speaking to the morals of said company or it's constitutents, it's sustainable existence depends on monopolizing volunteer support for subsystems that it finds to be marketable.
This isn't a conflict of interest, necessarily. However, people are Afraid there might be if there hasn't been already been underhanded tactics, exploiting their income to rapidly expand development for an ultra specific however most leverage-able component of the GNU/Linux system, implementing more features, faster, and with fewer bugs than can possibly be audited for by volunteers. If no one can replace systemd because they simply can't code as well as them nearly as fast as them, because they lack the income to survive doing so, it means that the strength of desire to advance humanity will soon no longer be the most significant force enabling the development of linux, as, regardless of the morals and vision the redhat team have, others will follow their example. At the end of the day, this is an improper means to get to goals that for all intensive purposes are simultaneously uncertain and hard to argue with. What happens when other organisations realize they can build leverage over the linux community by ultra-specializing, and massively accelerating the development of a very tiny component of the system with very rapid bug-free feature creeps, effectively making it bloatware that functions REALLY WELL and encouraging people to either expand it according to their vision or feel deprived of it. Right now, it's very difficult to say whether or not this is an intention of the redhat team and it would be very reasonable to call it unintentional, but their behavior is suggesting to others that this is an acceptable practice regardless of intentions.
I sincerely understand these are people trying to make the world a sweeter place albeit in a "ends are more important than means"-kinda-unintentional-way. These aren't super-villains like PR would have us believe, in fact quite likely very much the opposite.
This isn't really the poster-example of a healthy way of settling differences inside a community. Maybe the redhat team should have done more to trying reaching out to the most informed systemd critics, and maybe those critics should have done more to beat down the flames their words fanned. This whole debacle seems far from civil and I don't understand why, fully yet.
Hope, I'm helping with perspective :d