It was certainly nicer than sysvinit, but its event-based model absolute hell to debug, IME. (It basically required the user to program a state machine around a

It was certainly nicer than sysvinit, but its event-based model absolute hell to debug, IME. (It basically required the user to program a state machine around all the events that could happen on a system.) Just look at the bugs on Upstart in the Ubuntu bug tracker if you don't believe me. There were bugs in there that languished for years because they were basically unsolvable. The original author of Upstart basically admitted (to his credit!) that systemd's model is superior after Upstart had been in out in the wild for a few years.