> even if reliable service stopping is the only advantage systemd will bring to servers it'll be enough to justify ...
As someone who used daemontools for years, having reliable service stop/start/status with automatic restart and capturing stdout/stderr for logging are the main features that I need that existing init systems don't do. I'd love to stop requiring third party infrastructure like daemontools/runit or monit or even hackier stuff like cron jobs, to health check and restart critical services.