I believe he meant "more standardized". I find that working with systemd is more predictable than with sysvinit and things that I expect to be able to do work as I expect them to work.
Ahhh like "more formally defined". Interesting. I've not run in that particular problem with svsvinit in the last couple decades, so I didn't see the synonym.
Loads of sysvinit scripts are distribution specific. With systemd, these are now shipped upstream. No clue what your problem is, but there are loads of benefits to systemd, suggest to try it out (and then recent version, not some old Fedora).
If the startup scripts are upstreamed and standard then the init system should be standard. Systemd is not standard because it relies on Linux kernel specific semantics.
BSD or any other kernels are left with no updated userland because they don't implement the same semantics.
You realistically expect BSD to ever use a GPL licensed init system? I don't see the point of systemd being able to run under BSD. BSD wants to get rid of every GPL licensed software, including GCC. You really expect them to consider switching their init system.
Aside from this, standard has nothing to do with Linux only or not. E.g. Microsoft Office is a de facto standard, it only runs on Windows and a not exactly the same version is available on Mac OS. Not on Linux, not on BSD. The file format is a standard.
Firstly, SystemD is licensed under the LGPL so it's not as viral.
Secondly, they've already changed project licenses before in 2012. Should the need arise to switch over to a more permissive license, they could ask again and strip out the code the can't get permission to change.
Sure. Don't get me wrong, I can write scripts to work with sysvinit too, but there's a lot more reading and cookbooking involved. I haven't had the same issue with systemd or upstart.