System V init was decent enough for the time, but today it's relatively garbage compared to the alternatives.

Services die? Oh well, I guess they'll just stay dead. At least systemd has a wrapper that restarts them.

Also the "write a shell script with magical comments in it and lots of low-level bash" is not an elegant solution to any problem.

Fedora's been pretty good about supporting legacy sysvinit style scripts and there will always be a way to use them.