Forking implies inheriting the design, including all its flaws. You can hack around with the codebase all you like, but if you can't fix the design issues, bec

Forking implies inheriting the design, including all its flaws. You can hack around with the codebase all you like, but if you can't fix the design issues, because it would be breaking interoperability, you're a bit limited in what you can do. Other init systems were sufficiently constained in scope that they could be swapped out with relative ease, and modified or rewritten entirely as you liked.