Comment by einpoklum

> Diehards feel it felt "foisted" upon us before it was fully baked

That was the minor problem. The major meta-problems are that:

1. The baked form itself is broken. It has numerous fundamentally flawed aspects to its design (and to its existence as a project). More baking would not have helped this.

2. It is not intended as an option, nor even just the default option - but to make more and more utilities and libraries for managing various system facilities and services become unusable and incompatible, to be taken over by systemd. It's not like foisting, say, Thunderbird instead of Evolution as the default mail client; if you don't like it, you run the other thing. Or even version X of the kernel instead of version Y of the kernel and so on.

> everyone knew sysvinit was way past its prime

At this point we can say with clarity that systemd has almost nothing to do with the choice of init system. You could replace the init system with any number of things - some already existing 15 years ago, some which could be developed in the mean time. In hindsight, this is an excuse and not a reason.