[digi_owl]

That is the crazy part, systemd at its core is a reaction to sysv (and upstart).

In part part the reaction is to the boilerplate nature of sysv scripts, as they bring all their logic with them.

but if you glance outside the RH/Debian sphere you find the likes of Slackware, that has been using BSD style init for decades.

[yellowapple]

Slackware's a bit of a peculiar case. It does indeed use /etc/rc.d in a somewhat-BSD-style manner, but there are two key differences:

* Slackware doesn't use a BSD-style /etc/rc.conf. Instead, daemons are enabled/disabled by setting the executable flag on each initscript. While this loses some of the features of /etc/rc.conf, I personally like this method better.

* Slackware doesn't include an equivalent to /etc/rc.d/rc.subr, which means there's a lot of boilerplate in its initscripts.

But yes, systemd's primary objections to shell-based init systems in general seem to stem from a limited scope.