I use Debian allot, i never really cared about the philosophy of the boot process and system start. It's just the thing that does the thing, every few months when i restart a server.
But if you read the posts of the Debian community their anger and hatred rivals that of religious debates.
Just to name a few arguments
For systemd: it's faster & easier to configure,
against it: it's new=relearning & a breach with KISS (keep it simple stupid)
Is this really a major thing or just allot of people making noise about reconciling their desire for individuality with their desire for community ? or maybe just resistance to change ?
If " it's new=relearning" was ever a valid argument, I think cavemen would have never learned to use fire. I know this is an over-simplification (relearning takes time, and time is money, and so on), but really... change happens, or things die.
Why is it a breach with KISS? I've never used anything else other than systemd, and I find it very intuitive given its parallelization capabilities. If I am not mistaken, with init there was a file init.rc that would contain all the scripts that were run at system start, in the order they were meant to be run. systemd is designed to allow the parallel execution of scripts, speeding up the boot process (that's why it's faster) and I think it does just that in a very KISS way.
you think it's not a breach with KISS ? interesting.
I guess that there's more than one valid interpretation of what's simple.
There probably is no objective resolution to the argument whether doing things in parallel or in series is simpler. But for me personally it's definitely simpler to stuff in series.
Just start using systemd, believe me, you'll like the much easier diagnostics, faster operation, and more disambiguous and complete feedback it provides.
There isn't much to learn to systemd really, the old commands still work in systemd, they are automatically "translated", but after a week or so, you'll just use the systemd commands, well, that's how it went with me years ago when systemd was implemented.