I am sure anything I say will be disregarded by systemd afficiandos but I still will open up about the issue.

As an end user you probably have no problems with systemd, it is just like any other init system to start up your computer so you can get to the point of using your thingy, whether it be a desktop, a phone, a television, a washing machine, a car or whatever.

However for a developer who is actually creating the end user experience these things are pretty important. My work pretty much falls between the phase when the kernel first stage loader starts and when the init process has fired up the final set of daemons setting up the box to behave like an user wants.

Now my gripes against systemd are because it tries to be too much! It contains duplicity of functions normally handled by trusty unix pieces, and hides the internals to try to smooth things up. But when you are building a system you want to be in control of how and when things happen, systemd gets in the way of that work.

Also journal is everything but optimized; there are severe problems with it and debugging those are real pain. It might sound like a good idea to integrate logging to the initializing system but take my word for it, it has caused considerable pain. (timing changes cause journal to mixup or miss lines, lots of writing blocks parts of the system for ages, races in places where it doesn't block, integrity failures in reboots and as the bloody piece is comprised of binary records! handling those when rotating logs takes *time*!...)