I mean, I still think it's just a matter of being different. What systemd does is actually more consistent with the old Unix philosophy (in this case at least,

I mean, I still think it's just a matter of being different. What systemd does is actually more consistent with the old Unix philosophy (in this case at least, systemd is hardly a paragon of Unixy-ness), where a command succeeding without a problem should just return silently. If it fails, you get a short message that says why and reminds you how to check the logs. I agree that it should just output the log messages, but I don't think there is any serious UI problem here apart from just being different. It's also worth noting that the detailed error message you get from Apache isn't universal and depends on the app and how the init script is written. Plenty of sysv services just give you a cryptic error message on failure, e.g. when I restart postgres on my FreeBSD server with invalid configuration it just says "failed" and I have to then enter another command to see why.