Miquel van Smoorenburg never worked for Redhat that I know of. It was not a "Redhat init" as you call it. Indeed, it wasn't even init. The things that we are

Miquel van Smoorenburg never worked for Redhat that I know of. It was not a "Redhat init" as you call it. Indeed, it wasn't even init. The things that we are talking about are rc, not init, in the van Smoorenburg system. Nor was there the sort of exclusive "compatibility mode" that you are envisaging in order to make your argument that mixmastamyk was referring to Upstart. Upstart could employ van Smoorenburg rc scripts, but that was not a mode. Upstart was still event-driven with job files. The van Smoorenburg rc scripts were run via what was just another job file. Were your argument valid for Upstart, it would equally be valid for systemd's mechanism for invoking van Smoorenburg rc scripts, and you would have to say that systemd is shell-script-based boot, which really makes a nonsense of mixmastamyk talking about "going back" to it from systemd. Quite clearly, going back to Upstart is not what mixmastamyk was talking about, which not least can be seen from xyr comment written, next to yours, 4 days beforehand.