> Don't presume to know things about other people...
That would be why I started my initial comment with questions, rather than presuming that I knew your background and knowledge and launching into poorly-formed and ill-founded accusation and/or assertion. :)
I'm trying to have a serious, level-headed discussion about a topic that is -inexplicably- sensitive for a few groups of people. In order to do so, I need to discover the pertinent information about the background and knowledge of my conversation partners.
> If you actually meant services, then what's your point?
I did. That would be why I asked about services rather than RC systems. :) I know that many people don't work this way, but if you can try to keep in mind [0] that I try hard to say what I mean, and leave nothing but white noise in between the lines of my statements.
Anyway, my point is this. You said:
> I'd take systemd over sysv init, atd, crond, three or four watcher daemons, syslog, various other semi-maintained tools that replicate each other's functionality...
which I took to be a little strange. It seems like this is your understanding of the typical set of services a Linux system runs, but it doesn't jive with how either I or my handful of professional sysadmin friends run our systems. We generally don't run atd, leave any FS watching up to the software package that actually needs it, avoid using tools that duplicate each other's functionality like the plague, and tend to not use unmaintained software... unless it's clear that that software is "done".
I've known several friends and acquaintances who have gone off to work for Red Hat. They've -to a man- come back with some really strange, very hard-line positions about how Linux systems are "supposed" to work. One of them vehemently insisted that -because of the complexity of dependency management and testing- a highly-flexible, rolling-release distro like Gentoo Linux was impossible. [1] Because of my personal experience with how Red Hat seems to have enweirdened some of my friends and acquaintances, and because I knew next to nothing about your background, I wanted to ensure that you had indeed stepped out of the Red Hat bubble and seriously looked at what other companies and distros consider a typical set of services and the features provided by and operation of their sysvrc replacements.
[0] I won't fault you if you can't. I have quite a difficult time remembering what I had for breakfast, let alone the rhetorical styles of the couple-dozen one-off Internet conversation partners that I've had over the past several months. :)
[1] Note that his position was not "Only a fool would attempt to provide guaranteed enterprise support for any and all arbitrary Gentoo Linux configurations because of $COMPLEXITY."! I can't argue with that position. I asked him if perhaps he misspoke and that maybe this or something similar was closer to his actual position. He vehemently denied that it was, and doubled-down on his original statement.