For anyone looking for an out, but wants to keep using linux... Gentoo. You can even use it with systemd. It's all about choice.
Follow the handbook, it's worth it. Once that gets too tedious, checkout https://github.com/jakeogh/sendgentoo
Follow the handbook, it's worth it. Once that gets too tedious, checkout https://github.com/jakeogh/sendgentoo
Slackware(1993!) has been around longer than Gentoo(2000), but USE flags, slots, _choice_ and control over the compilation stack are pretty nice. NixOS's package manager and portage hopefully merge sometime in the future. I havent tried Void.
We didnt need to have the init system debate, it was never a possibility that Gentoo would be monoinit.