LPC: Booting and systemd

How are the debugging capabilities in systemd? As an Ubuntu user, I've found that debugging upstart (well upstart + plymouth + init) is incredibly painful. In my case it has had to do mostly with getting filesystems mounted at boot, but it was nearly enough for me to throw up my hands and give up on Ubuntu altogether. My initial impression was that I liked the concepts of upstart better than systemd, but honestly all I really care for in my init system is that it gets my system up and running quickly and is easy to debug, and so far Ubuntu has failed with at this for me.