I'm pretty happy with systemd on my macbook (running Arch). Not sure what you're doing on that ledge, but I've been running and managing linux systems for over 10 years (I only use Windows for games, and OSX on the road). systemd's user interface (i.e. writing the confs, controlling the processes) is fine, and that's about all that's important for users.

What I don't get is why so many people are in this debate. It hardly matters to anyone what init system (or 'central management and configuration system') is used. It doesn't matter to users, they just want their linux systems to boot, and their confs to be easy to write. It doesn't matter to user space developers, it's just another system to implement support for, conveniently one that's used by most distros and as far as I can tell not terribly hard to grok.

Well I was using systemd-analyze and systemctl {cat,disable, restart} and it seemed similar to Upstart in Ubuntu if not better. (And I was able to use it intuitively without needing to refer to manpages).

What understanding do you think they would need to have to find your unhappiness?

Because while I'm sure in a competition of esoteric kernel knowledge I would lose to a great many people, I also simply don't care. systemd makes establishing my service start up dependencies amazingly simple. It makes daemon deployment simple. It simplifies a whole host of problems which are not cleanly solvable by other means. It handles process restarts, limits and a whole host of other things for me.

No one is bringing a superior solution to the table. Everyone is telling me daemon-tools and init scripts are "fine" (they're not).

Considering how many distros have adopted systemd, of whom I am willing to bet most of their devs "understand" Linux and aren't completely against systemd, I would not say that they are happy with it because they don't understand it.

Classic ad hominem. Do you have anything substantive?

FTR, I understand "linux"[1] better than most and I'm very happy with systemd. So there. It's by no means perfect and could probably stand to be revisited architecture-/design-wise in a few years when there's even wider community experience with it -- but that can come as incremental improvements.

[1] Whether you meant the kernel or user-space. Both as a user, administrator and developer.