I find hard to read such comments and think that they are valuable contributions anymore.
First of all, Pulseaudio was not the biggest success, true, but can't someone learn from their mistakes? Both are also living, moving software products that continue to improve, as you said, "development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently" - key words: "until recently".
Also: just saying that something is a myth does not make it any less true. The whole point is that systemd (and Pulseaudio) is anti-Unix because its author does not understand Unix design, how would his opinion be of any value in this matter?
I find his arguments quite compelling and honestly, at this stage saying "the author does not understand Unix" just sounds silly.
Judging by his work and his writings, Lennart probably sleeps with a copy of "The Unix Programming Environment" or other such classic under his pillow. He probably knows Unix 10x better than you or me (feel free to point me to your resume/bio if my assumption is wrong :) ).
Just say that you don't agree with his design.
That's fine and it's acceptable. It also turns this debate into something kind of like Linux versus Minix. Working code (his) wins for now ;)
The design is still beyond horrible, and on par with Windows. If everything that can be shoehorned into a system and "works" despite being a complicated mess, was accepted, we would have adopted Windows registry and SNMP as primary configuration mechanisms, too -- after all, they both work more reliably than Pulseaudio does.
First of all, Pulseaudio was not the biggest success, true, but can't someone learn from their mistakes? Both are also living, moving software products that continue to improve, as you said, "development marred with huge number of bugs that ruined audio on Linux until recently" - key words: "until recently".
Secondly, about the technical aspects:
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ -> "The systemd for Administrators Blog Series"
Lennard Poettering said it better than I ever will.