when i was looking at taking over maintenance of depinit one of the first tasks was to add full automated compatibility for initscripts. signiicant advantages of depinit were lost in the process but there was no loss when compared to sysvinit itself. individual initscripts could then be replaced to provide a much better way of handling services (safe_mysqld for example could be dispensed with entirely).
even with that in mind i see no down-side to the additional workload that you refer to when you consider the upside that diversity brings. no monoculture, no centralised control, and a need for people managing *different* projects - the components that systemd has [irresponsibly] made quotes redundant quotes - to communicate, discuss and agree interoperable standards.
the abdication of responsibility by all distros has taken away the opportunity for diverse and disparate teams to work together, shunting aside all the safeguards that are normally in place and allowing lennart pottering and his team to arbitrarily and unilaterally decide how GNU/Linux should work.
this, then, primarily is what i do not understand that people do not understand.
l.
You absolutely have a point. we shouldn't be putting all our eggs into the same basket. What will happen if that basket gets holes in it?
This is the case of systemd.
I prefer not to trust systemd for this, security issues, stability issues and also my laptop runs slower with it.
I compared the difference between debian and devuan and I was sorely dissapointed by debian.