The way you overthrow an overlord you no longer like is by knuckling down, working hard, kicking out a replacement. This is how LibreSSL came around (http://libressl.org).

There's nothing especially wrong with the idea of systemd or the way it's been deployed, but if the code-base is suffering from neglect one way to fix that is to either support the core team, or barring that due to hostility, fork and/or make a work-alike.