Well, that's a lot of text to read. My (high-level) thoughts as a systemd user for 10 years is that it improved some things, made a few things worse, but I would not want to go back to the init.d days. Having a daemon around to manage the lifecycle of services is actually a good idea and most of the *ctl programs are preferable to the manual configuring they replace.
This is an absolutely fantastic review of systemd. The technical section alone is well worth the effort to read carefully if you use Linux in any significant capacity. The history and analysis are pure gems.
This contributes nothing to the discussion, but towards the end of this excellent article I noticed myself reading “welcomed” phonetically as “welcome-dee”.
Ah, hacker news, the web site that can't detect duplicates or afford a message preview.<p>Anybody else amused that we use this bare-bones, no-frills forum to discuss high-tech? ;)