I keep hoping that somebody will do to systemd what git did to Monotone and/or BitKeeper: take the good parts and package them up into a small, self-contained thing that other things can be built on.

There's a lot of things in systemd that make it much nicer to build on than sysvinit (most recent example: systemd-cat pipes a process' stdout to the system log, but unlike /bin/logger, it takes the command-to-run as command-line arguments, so I don't need the security hole of invoking a shell or manually set up a pipeline), but then there's weird glitchy corner cases, like the article you link to, or "if somebody bounces the dbus daemon, you have to hard-reboot the machine to get things working again".