As for overengineered - well, we brought this onto ourselves - by having no standards, ironically. The distros won't ever agree on the structure of the OS? Well, if you can't bring a mountain to a man, you have to bring a man to a mountain.
If you want to bring order into a disordered system, you have to engineer for every contigency.
The plan is to run on every distro. How do you cover every distro?
So this is actually the least overengineered solution, it could be way, WAY worse.
As for overengineered - well, we brought this onto ourselves - by having no standards, ironically. The distros won't ever agree on the structure of the OS? Well, if you can't bring a mountain to a man, you have to bring a man to a mountain.
@drq And that's the best part.