Distributors ponder a systemd change

In my experience as a Linux instructor, one or two hours of systemd instruction is adequate to provide the basics for people who would otherwise be using System-V init as system administrators. Building on that, it is certainly more feasible to spend another couple of hours teaching somebody how to write a systemd service unit file for a new service and to integrate that into an existing setup, than it is to spend a couple of days teaching them enough shell scripting and distribution-specific minutiae to be able to write a robust System-V init script for a new service and to integrate that into an existing setup, on one single distribution. (The next distribution is going to be subtly, or not so subtly, different.)

For an upstream project, it is reasonable to invest the time to produce a good systemd-based configuration, which by now is likely to be applicable with few if any changes to a large number of platforms, because the effort for that is going to be smaller, in the long run, than the effort required to test and tweak new versions of their application (or application stack) on a huge number of subtly different legacy environments that all require some degree of individual adaptation.