How can people replace SysVinit without "doing their own take on EEE"? Your alternative approach is still not going to be compatible with SysVinit either, not to mention it being strikingly similar to systemd.
The problem is less the init system itself, but applications that depend on a specific init system [1] (gnome used to be a major source of contention in that regard).
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hard_dependencies_on_systemd
And like I already mentioned in my previous post.. there are other alternatives around than just SysV-init..
Gnome does not depend on systemd, but rather logind.
KDE used to be the same, until someone started maintaining ConsoleKit2 again, proper, at which point they were happy to support it.
ConsoleKit was dropped because it just wasn't being maintained, and had various limitations.
Maybe it's simply easier to maintain this way?
elogind exists, if you care. It exposes the DBus interfaces that logind supports for applications to call.
Thus, environments like Gnome can be supported on non-systemd systems if they emulate and/or expose and implement the required DBus interfaces.
See also https://lwn.net/Articles/586141
By not tightly bundling their init with other OS components, by not having GNOME desktop somehow depend on what init system you're using (as opposed to services running under that init system).
Also you know how shell scripts have `#!/usr/bin/env bash` at the top of them? Well the reason why my hypothetical init system would be compatible with SysVinit is because instead of `#!/usr/bin/env bash` it would have `#!/usr/bin/env new_init_language` at the top of it. 'new_init_language" could implement almost all the same features that systemd unit files do.