> But I know that when I pull a 3 year old log out of the archive, I can gunzip it and will still be able to read it, no matter how much the file format has changed since then, and I don't have to dig up a 3 year old magic decoder program (that may only run on one operating system) to be able to see what's in the file.

Oh, but you can rest assured that systemd will never, ever have a breaking change. Lennart Poettering can be trsuted to never do something that would cause anybody any trouble! /s

And that's the problem: systemd is a great idea, and it does a lot of really great things, but the man in charge simply can't be trusted not to break things. It was one thing when he was breaking desktops with PulseAudio; it's an entirely different thing now that his decisions can break servers (how many systems have broken due to nohup no longer doing its job?), and break the ability to retrieve logs over time.

I honestly think that systemd is going to arrive at a good place eventually, and a great deal of credit will belong to Poettering. But it will also cause a great deal of harm before it gets there, and he deserves a great deal of the blame.