I have very mixed thoughts on the whole thing. On one hand debugging a layered system with cleanly separated scripts is much easier. But a lo of time that debugging is needed because different things won't play together nicely. Systemd kinda fixes that by implementing a lot of those.
But I don't feel quite comfortable having such a tight woven system inside, becuase to me systemd seems like a "OS within OS" or "kernel over kernel" type of thing and very blackboxy.
On the third hand, would love to see Linux boot as fast as Windows 8.1. I know that Winows is kind of cheating with FastBo