It's worth remembering that much of the churn was caused not by having to rewrite configuration, but by the multitude of bugs that plagued systemd early on, and

It's worth remembering that much of the churn was caused not by having to rewrite configuration, but by the multitude of bugs that plagued systemd early on, and the way they were treated did not help. systemd upstream was extremely difficult to work with and made a lot of people reluctant to embrace change, because when something didn't work -- which we all understood was natural for software developed in the open -- you were pretty much screwed. Shell scripts and duct tape were bad but it could take less time to fix something than it took to get people "up there" to admit that they're really looking at a bug, not a feature. I ran systemd very early on because it gave me some things I liked from SMF but I completely understand why so many people hated it. It's a (suite of) program(s) with good ideas that was hampered by extremely poor maintainership and relation with other open source projects.