That is half the problem. They often introduce neat ideas, but then fail or refuse to integrate them with he rest of the FOSS ecosystem. Then anyone who subscribes to their experiment is left cleaning up the mess and trying to migrate the features or ideas they like to the remaining projects that should have been extended in the first place.
Not sure how you can say that about upstart. It was pretty much the accepted successor to shell scripts for an init system, for a few years until Redhat started pushing systemd. You would probably be using it now if Debian hadn't gone with the Redhat systemd over OpenRC and upstart.
