It felt too restrictive to me. Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning. One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.
systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces.
> One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.
You can keep a syslog implementation like rsyslog installed, and you'll continue to have text logs too. And journalctl outputs plain text.
people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by default.
Where in my comment did I imply that the journal was "bad"? The journal is awesome. But if you have some workflow designed around syslog, such as a log analyzer or statistics package that you don't want to tweak, text logging still works just fine.
...and the manpages for every tool, every config file, built-in units, and every type of unit, plus the extensive documents linked from https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/ , including a 21-part series of articles targeted at system administrators, a dozen more pages targeted at users and administrators about specific topics, several dozen documents for developers, a dozen videos...
There are many criticisms you could reasonably throw at systemd, but "not well documented" certainly doesn't seem like one of them.