Not a surprise, was there a compelling reason for upstart at all?
I was rooting for upstart for years but it's hard to take seriously as a project when basic sysadmin tasks are still gratuitously hard / unreliable.
What are you talking about?
They should have copied prior art from launchd or some inetd implementations where the delay has a back off mechanism with some configurable min/max limits.
Moreover systemd has defined a bunch of stable interfaces; one could choose to expose equivalent interfaces in the HURD rather than port. Upstart seems to be in the "implementation = interface" camp.
Edit: Upstart was a great sysvinit replacement, at least during those years before systemd appeared.
I'm honestly not sure if you are making fun of upstart or if you're trying to say that having to keep a sysv compatibility mode around because upstart is not able to handle an extremely common daemon is somehow acceptable.
https://coreos.com/docs/launching-containers/launching/getti...
For what it's worth, Docker containers are generally not complete running machines with their own init system. Instead, they're typically a single top-level process running in an isolated container. Basically, they work more like a Heroku app than complete EC2 machine image.
For an example how you should build a Docker container, take a look at http://phusion.github.io/baseimage-docker/