Langasek: Upstart in Debian

The init system is simply an automated system for doing all the things a capable sysadmin should be able to do manually. i.e. if the internet is available and you cannot connect to it, or a filesystem needs mounting and you cannot do that outside the aegis of the init system, there are worse problems at hand.

Personally, I recently upgraded a very outdated Arch system, and in the process changed over to systemd. The least of my problems was learning my way around systemd. It didnt seem that alien, compared to the sort of wrappers I am used to on Gentoo. I even tried out the journal logging. For my use case, it seems awkward and slow, but you can just use your old syslog daemon if you want to ignore that. I can see where it could be great for people who need to do automated forensics on logs via scripting and the like, though.