How often do you reboot your kit? Boot time is such a stupid metric even on laptops and stuff where you just suspend/hibernate.
My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me.
Suspend/hibernate on free unixes is a nightmare of incomplete support and buggy drivers, so not much of a solution. I'm don't know a single person who has a working laptop suspend/resume setup on FreeBSD (though it's theoretically possible), and it's not usually recommended to rely on it even if you could get it working. Linux has somewhat more complete support, but it's still very hit or miss, and it's common for stuff to be wonky after a resume, even when it does work.
I'll give you that to a degree. It does suck on FreeBSD with my X201. Nothing works but I'm being cheeky now and running it in VirtualBox on top of windows (which I need for other work).
The main question is would it work?
For me systemd or applications starting to support systemd only break things (something wrong with policykit/consolekit for example with sysvinit+systemd-shim) that used to work.
Also there are some peculiarities in the way the LSB init script compatibility is implemented in systemd: it tries to be 'smart' and remember their state.
So you start an init script, and it failed for some reason / perhaps even exited with an error code, perhaps you are still developing that init script.
Now fixing the problem and running the init script / systemctl start doesn't even try to run the script because it thinks it has run it yet. You first have to tell it to stop it (which fails), and only then you can run it again.
My FreeBSD system has a 30-second timeout during which the entire boot process is halted because it waits for a default route to the internet... which it won't get, because I haven't configured one.
It's pretty dumb, and not enough of a problem for me that I'd figure out how to work around it, but it's a pretty good example.
I don't think this 30-second timeout is a bug in FreeBSD or in rc. You may want your server to wait for the network to become available. Ubuntu Server has the same "waiting for network" timeout:
But the only reason this is necessary is when the boot system isn't smart enough to start whatever can safely be started through proper dependencies.
My experience is that a substantial amount of time is wasted weeding out undesired timeouts in startup scripts, because they lead to increasing downtime.
My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me.
Proof:
http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png
Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...