The problem is - they are keeping adding unnecessary stuff to just keep going, regardless of whether it is better, rational or not.

All those replacement of classic shell-script-based start-up tools, adding countless "managers" and "buses" and "services" and "settings daemons" just makes the whole thing worse.

It is like MS or SAP - keep producing bigger and bigger bloatware until there are no more suckers to buy it.

Piling up meaningless stuff is not just a Linux distro problem. It is also in languages (look at CL or R6RS) and libraries. Almost everywhere, especially in non-CS world.)

The more sane approach is, surprise! of BSD systems. They have an OS and a system of packages made out of ports of OSS software. They keep the core OS stable, sane, and without unnecessary, unreasonable changes. CenOS also has some additional repositories, but it is basically a polished Fedora anyway.