At first I didn't care much for the idea of having to learn yet another init system but as I had to write ansible automation stuff for services on Centos 7 it was kind of required that I have some basic understanding of systemd. I have to say now that I'm more familiar with it it has begun to grow on me.

There is something subjectively nice to me about running systemctl status and seeing a nice, clear picture of what the current state of services are on a system, being able to control the life cycle of a service including having systemd monitor and restart it, not having to deal with improperly written init scripts, etc.

Stockholm Syndrome perhaps?

The idea of systemd isn't bad. What's annoying is the friction involved in using it.

It's just a shade too ornate, a little too magical, in both cases only by a small degree, but it's an important one.

Creating a workable systemd init script is actually pleasant. Getting it running is easy. Checking for errors with status is nice, but searching the logs is annoying.

pm2 (https://github.com/Unitech/pm2) has a neat feature where you can watch logs easily, someting that systemd should totally steal and pack into journalctl, like "systemctl logs sshd" shows it in real-time, an alias to the obnoxiously verbose "journalctl -u sshd -f"