I've been a fan of systemd even if just for how much simpler creating services is. I just need to write a simple config file instead of a complex init script.
+1 - there was a misconception that initscripts were easy or simple - if you wanted _correct, bug free_ initscript you were probably looking at around 100 lines of shell script.
Or if the service didn't support pam_limits because it was legacy trash, you had to hack something into the initscript like `ulimit -n XYZ` and restart it. Now things like this are trivial and easy to solve. Using systemd makes large scale Linux systems administration much easier.
Now it has gone a bit overboard. Some of the stuff like the dns resolver or the nspawn capability seem a bit over the top, but overall, it has massively improved all Linux distributions it is used in.
Never again will I worry about trash buggy init scripts not actually stopping a service due to a stale pid file. Now it puts the service into a control group and can kill all things in the control group even if the service is bad code.
