Right, like I said I don't think any init system has actually figured this out but that is what as an admin I actually care about rather than startup times or t

Right, like I said I don't think any init system has actually figured this out but that is what as an admin I actually care about rather than startup times or the aesthetic properties of the configuration files. You would need some kind of semantics that define what it means for a system to be "ready". In practice we tended to lean towards some kind of polling of the service itself (which is at least slightly better than "sleep 3" or whatever). Now, it's true that if applications would adopt systemd's Notify system this could really help, but this is equivalent to saying "if software were different it might be better".