There was a little bit of pain but it was nowhere near as bad as some make out. I migrated all my arch boxes at the time just fine and the main work was writing

There was a little bit of pain but it was nowhere near as bad as some make out. I migrated all my arch boxes at the time just fine and the main work was writing unit files -- which compared to writing init scripts was mainly trivial. Is systemd the best init system? No. But to some of us it was an improvement over what came before it and it really hasn't given us the trouble that others claim it has given them. I remember a colleague who ran Linux From Scratch on his laptop who was abhorred by the changes. We spent an afternoon trying to remove the stuff from an Ubuntu VM image he didn't consider necessary and a lot of it was really alien to him. As an fvwm user he really couldn't understand why almost everything needed dbus and pulseaudio. I couldn't understand a lot of the strange packaging dependencies either. And yet these are things that to me have improved real pain-points in linux distros.