[forgottenpass]

I find myself wondering why the init is supposed to figure out what the computer is to be doing.

I've never messed with systemd configuration too much, but is it much more complicated than a make-style "how do I get there from here? OK lets do that"?

[MertsA]

That's actually a pretty good summary of the difference between Upstart and systemd, with systemd your services declare what they depend on and your runlevel is now a "target" that declares that it depends on certain services. It does dependency resolution just like a package manager does.

[digi_owl]

The term "dependency hell" comes to mind...

[MertsA]

If that were true you could never start those services in sysvinit either. It works great because there aren't cyclic references and practically no conflicting services. The dependency tree will always be pretty simple.