Not sure how you can say that about upstart. It was pretty much the accepted successor to shell scripts for an init system, for a few years until Redhat started

Not sure how you can say that about upstart. It was pretty much the accepted successor to shell scripts for an init system, for a few years until Redhat started pushing systemd. You would probably be using it now if Debian hadn't gone with the Redhat systemd over OpenRC and upstart.