Systemd solves so many pain points in all areas that I don't care about ideological debates.
And most of the touted "advantages" of sysvinit are, in practice, a nightmare. "people should just know what they're doing"? Well, too bad, nobody does! Distribution maintainers don't know how to write robust init scripts, software vendors don't know how to write robust init scripts, nobody does!
Taking away the "freedom" to introduce the halting problem to service definitions is, in practice, godsent.
"With BSD init, I can just edit the /etc/rc script and replace it with arbitrary shell code."
And now try to debug it one year later when you don't even remember that you did any changes to it. The shit I've seen on Linux systems' /etc/rc.local would give Lovecraft nightmares.
And the ability to sprinkle echo statements all over your init system does not make a system "easy to debug", unless you're a PHP "devop" who thinks that OOP is the source of all evil in the world.
"The way systemd does parallel startup bothers me. If service A depends on service B, they were traditionally started in sequence; A only starts after B is done starting."
Unless it doesn't, because init scripts _cannot_ reliably determine whether a daemon has started up. Grab, say, debian's sysvinit sctipts and count the amount of sleep statements sprinkled all over them. That's not sequential startup, that's a race condition waiting to happen!
"Why should systemd implement NTP when ntpd already exists?"
Because ntpd is a steaming, insecure pile of crap. And no, openntpd is not a solution, it's just a nicer problem. Why do I need an ntp server on a pure client machine? Just because ntpdate is an even bigger pile of crap?
"Being unable to shutdown the system."
As if that never happened with sysvinit. Badly behaving init scripts can cause a lot of havoc, at least systemd has a configurable hard cut-off.
"Debian should not have adopted it for at least a few more years; they’re supposed to be the slow, steady, and stable distro. "
Debian profits the most from ripping out the unusable joke that was their own "parallelized startup enabled" sysvinit. I've seen more Debian stable+sysvinit systems unable to boot up than I've seen Arch+systemd systems.