It's so far been adopted by redhat, suse, arch, coreos and with some consideration by debian. The only big name not thinking about it is Ubuntu.

I don't think that many of the journald drivers could have been solved by better syslogd configuration, for example journald cryptographically signs each log entry. Even if you get root on my box, you can't edit an entry without me knowing. That's not possible in any meaningful way with syslog.

I don't share the view of a hack, the speed improvements of introducing journald have been tremendous and usability is mostly better.

For example, the number 1 thing done with syslog output is probably either grep it, so journald improves on this:

    journalctl _COMM=sshd --since yesterday --until "08:30"
    OR
    journalctl /usr/sbin/sshd --since yesterday --until "08:30"

    journalctl -F

It's good to be dropping things like syslogd from the default distribution, and the only reason it was ditched was because syslogd is behind the times.

Yes, syslogd does more. If you want those features, install it. Forcing it on everyone, regardless, serves no purpose.