But in Fedora we do have early access to the framebuffer. Plymouth uses that to display the animated Fedora logo and to prompt for any encryption passphrases.
The hardware needs to support it though, so you may not see this, especially when running in a virtual environment.
When it works right it looks pretty nice, you get a mostly seamless graphic screen after grub2 until gdm. And you can always hit ESC to see the scrolling systemd startup messages.
Year of Linux on the desktop, here we come!
Haven't major distros been doing this for years? I only see the output if I press escape, and pressing escape again suppresses it. Otherwise I just see a progress bar/animation.
I don't think that the runlevel numbers are sequential. You can switch between levels (and that corresponds to more or less services running) but you pretty much boot directly to runlevel 5.
Within a runlevel, services are ordered, though (either by an arbitrary integer or by dependency).