[vetinari]

> compare systemd's timers to cron implementations sharing crontab format, or systemd journal to syslog implementations, sharing its standardized protocols.

Well, but then you must be aware that you are leaving lot of effectiveness, unification and deduplication on the table.

See, many people think of systemd as if it was init replacement that grew timer support too. They are looking at the wrong level of abstraction: it is an event machine, that manipulates units when events happen. That event might be boot to certain runlevel, timer, hotlplug, incoming request on socket, dbus activation, whatever.

By cutting and dragging out one of the event handlers outside into special-cased, custom flow component that duplicates existing functionality anyway, you are ending up with a worse system.