I'd rather see init's problems fixed (i.e. start services in parallel), but systemd is far better than upstart (edit: got it to load at last, I see it's not by upstart fans, so ignore that last part).
That said, a lot of systemd seems like a really stupid idea to me, e.g. binary logs, the massively increased SPOF size, and the "do everything" mentality. Unfortunately, I don't know of any distros that aren't using it now (edit: I didn't even realise Slackware was still a thing...), and upstart is even more of a joke than systemd.
What's wrong with binary logs? Seems like an improvement, given how they can be cryptographically 'sealed' to help tamper detection, and have indexes built in [1].
Binary logs are pretty annoying because your standard tools for searching through them no longer works.
tail, less, grep, wc and similar tools are rendered useless. Newer tools like logstash or Splunk are also going to have issues reading your binary logs. It's not really a wise thing to break the tools that most people use every day, it's just going to make them hate you.
It sort of okay when you only have one system that does binary logs, but what if you have 5 or 10, each with their own log format and little tool that I need to pipe the log file through?
The binary logs also assumes that you actually know where stuff is or that you're not going to look across multiple systems in one go. If you're large enough you'll have logstash/splunk or something similar where you have already de-binarized the log and this become less of an issue.
But for may of us doing a "grep <something> 2014-04-*.log" is something that's just natural and we come a bit hostile if you're trying to take that away.
That being said I think systemd might have a way of just giving you the log in plaintext.
So pipe it to a file and operate on that. Or give the broken tool /dev/stdin as its filename. Or give it a fifo as a filename and "journalctl | /path/to/fifo.
> All the binary logs are going to do is make people have a cronjob to extract them regularly into a readable format.
For those who insist on that, yes. Most of them will presumably have logrotate set up anyway, so it's hardly more complexity. Or you can run a syslog, and trivially set up systemd to forward the log entries to that.
Meanwhile the rest of us will enjoy the ability to do things like specify a start and end time with command line switches when trying to find stuff in the log, filter by priority, filter by user, filter by pid. seeing only data since last boot, get the journal as JSON instead of having to rely on brittle text parsing of entries that contains less information.
Regarding the last point, here's an example of an entry from journalctl -o json-pretty:
> All the binary logs are going to do is make people have a cronjob to extract them regularly into a readable format.
Actually, they won't. Because journald has the relevant functionality built-in -- that is, it can automatically stream out the logs in any format you choose, including ones understood by rsyslogd, and if you really just don't like journald, you can just turn off it's storage and turn it into nothing but a shim.
You can still use those tools if you want, just pipe the output of journalctl, and use journalctl -f in place of tail -f. It's faster to filter logs using parameters to journalctl though, as it can use the indexes.
Also, systemd writes syslog style plaintext messages to an IPC socket at /run/systemd/journal/syslog if needed for compatibility.
I've got to agree with a lot of your points here, to paraphrase churchill, systemd is the worst system management daemon system that we have, except for all those other ones that have been tried from time to time. (this sounds a little harsh to the other ones, but I find systemd intuitive from a user-facing perspective even if it does have a lot of inelegance under the hood)
[0] http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChu...
That said, a lot of systemd seems like a really stupid idea to me, e.g. binary logs, the massively increased SPOF size, and the "do everything" mentality. Unfortunately, I don't know of any distros that aren't using it now (edit: I didn't even realise Slackware was still a thing...), and upstart is even more of a joke than systemd.