Poettering: Why systemd?

Also, it's not as if systemd removes -- or could ever remove -- the possibility to replace your binary with a wrapper shell script that does whatever necessary (as INND long has with its rc.news script). If you arrange for that script to not exec the daemon but instead keep running, stop daemonizing, and quit when the daemon does, and systemd can even monitor it automatically, just as if it were a real daemon.