[m0llusk]

Absolutely not the case. Even relatively simple real world uses involved collections of shell scripts to carefully mount or initialize services in just the right order and would often fail with weird and infrequent timing glitches. With systemd that all becomes explicit, so of course it is awkwardly verbose. That is the whole point and a huge upgrade.

[shevy-java]

I never used shell scripts for that. Ruby worked much better and easier. No glitches either.

I also fail to see how verbosity is a "huge upgrade".

[preg_match]

The problem is Ruby is not de-facto installed on most distros. Shell is the "universal" thing, but shell is actually not portable, even across distros. Perl is the only thing I'd qualify as both "sufficiently portal" and "universal". But then you have to write Perl, which nobody wants to do seemingly.

[jamespo]

So your systems have a dependency on ruby to startup and anyone who maintains it has to know ruby?