Alright, I'm an acquaintance of the author, so let me clear things up.
SystemXVI only began less than a couple of weeks ago, and is still a very early stage project. However, the author (David Mackay) decided to be a bit of an expedient troll and advertise on /g/, to arouse some controversy. It ended up blowing up greater than anticipated, even ending up being mocked on Linux Unplugged and hitting /r/linux as the project was still a skeleton.
First thing's first:
This is not a joke project. Mackay is not some amateur, either. He's a former Solaris/illumos committer and most recently was involved in the Tox community. He actually wrote a small service manager called Charge last year as an experiment, and some of the logic is borrowed on to SystemXVI (though the architecture is different).
SystemXVI, the design is quite interesting. The closest equivalent would probably be Solaris SMF, but it's still different. init(8) is kept small and instead SystemXVI is based on the idea of the service repository (inherited from SMF) and delegated restarters. The repository is a hash table that stores instance information and service properties. It's useful for having a point of fault recovery and to introspect services in a dynamic, transient manner as they run.
The primitive process management is currently in libs16rr, but the actual supervision strategy is defined in restarters. Much like Solaris SMF, there is a master restarter, but certain services (i.e. local socket services) can, for example, opt to be watched by a delegated inetd-like restarter that uses the SystemXVI RPC interfaces. Or let's say you have a Java, Erlang or other service that needs special behavior, you can write a restarter for it while reusing SystemXVI's process management.
TI-RPC/SunRPC plays a big role here. It's much leaner than D-Bus and at least nominally capable of network transparency. Android has a portable implementation in ~5000 LoC.
Dependencies and ordering is actually calculated by a separate process called svcorder, influenced by BSD systems' rcorder(8).
There will be systemd unit file compatibility. Internally, SystemXVI has semantics similar to systemd units, but much simplified - no need for transactions or complicated job modes, since a repository is used instead to contain state.
More here: https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/blob/master... (Flowchart: https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/blob/master...)
It's a refined SMF-like system with influences from daemontools and BSD rc.d. Very microkernel-ish, it's meant to have strong module/communication boundaries and have its components be easily hotswapped or rewritten per a stable RPC interface.
It's very early and the project really shouldn't be getting such publicity, but a pre-alpha might be out soon, and it's a project well worth watching. I have confidence it will turn out well.