[_jal]

Does anyone actually look at the systemd log? I ignore it. Rsyslogd handles all of our logging needs in a sensible textual format that does not require special commands to view or useless make-work to pipe into a database.

To answer your question, I thought and still think it was a bad choice. The only time I would ever be interested in the contents are during early-boot failures, exactly the time when the toolset is limited and most folks aren't familiar with what's available - exactly when simple text is easiest to work with without finding another machine to stare at the `journalctl` man page.

The rationalization about detecting record corruption makes very little sense to me. (Now, there is a valid concern about potential log forgery, enabled by poorly written apps that directly log user input without sanitation. But that's better mitigated in the buggy app, which almost certainly is doing other unsafe things with user input. And if that were actually the concern, they had other choices that would have been far less annoying.)