Yeah I actually appreciated how easy it was to create daemons with Upstart. I had no problem with it, I just remember a lot of people pissed off that Canonical wrote their own init service instead of using systemd (which they eventually moved to, and which I recognise people also have very strong feelings about).
Upstart came along about 5 years before the initial release of Systemd, so I don't think your memory is correct.
Systemd came as an evolution of Upstart, but Lennart and Kay claimed that there were design limitations to Upstart that prevented it from going as far as they want.
I'm not going into whether that was true, or just NIH, or whether Systemd is going in the right direction.