> system bootup was controlled by a bunch of shell scripts that made no sense to me And this is the problem. You're guilty of the very thing you're accusing th

> system bootup was controlled by a bunch of shell scripts that made no sense to me And this is the problem. You're guilty of the very thing you're accusing the author of. Some of those shell scripts are very simple and can be easily replaced with a configuration type file. Most are not. They do a ton of stuff, like create lock files, pid files, check for dependencies, check for existing processes, etc etc and couldn't be properly replaced by a configuration block. Using shell script gives you unbelievable flexibility in how you start a daemon that can never be replaced by a configuration script. So what happens? All that complex stuff stays in that script you can't understand and now you've added an additional layer of complexity that wasn't necessary. Every additional layer adds a point of failure and in my humble opinion, isn't worth the additional user-friendliness.