I think you’d have a more fruitful discussion if you stopped trying to call people noobs when they don’t agree with you.

For example, I’ve been dealing with SysV since the early 90s and while it’s gotten better since we no longer have to support the really bizarre Unix variants, my problem with init scripts wasn’t “indignity” but the lack of consistency across distributions and versions, which affects anyone shipping software professionally (“can’t do this easily until $distro upgrades coreutils”), and from an operator’s perspective using Python doesn’t make that better because instead of supporting one consistent thing you’d end up with the subset of features each application team felt like implementing, consistent only to the extent that they care to follow other projects. One virtue of systemd is that having a single common way to specify dependencies, restarts, customization, etc. avoids the ops people having to learn dozens of different variations of the same ideas and especially how to deal with their gaps. A few years back, a data center power outage at one place I worked really highlighted that: the systemd-based servers recovered quickly because they actually had working retries; all of the older stuff using SysV had to be manually reviewed because there were all kinds of problems like races on dependencies like DNS or NFS, retry logic which failed hard after a short period of time, failures because a stale PID file wasn’t removed, or cases where a vendor had simply never implemented retries in their init scripts. While in theory you can handle all of those in SysV most people never did.

After a couple decades of that, a lot of us don’t want to spend time on problems Microsoft solved in Bill Clinton’s first term.

It's entirely possible that both SysV init and systemd suck for different reasons. I'm still partial to systemd since it takes care of daemons and supervision in a way that init does not, but I'll take s6 or process-compose or even supervisord if I have to. Horses for courses.

Specifying system processes and their dependencies declaratively, rather than in a tangle of arbitrary executable code, is cleaner, more efficient, easier to use, and more auditable. And that's not even getting into the additional process management duties systemd assumes.

You can write arbitrary scripts into systemd... or like one step removed at most? That's not really a difference unless you have some nuance in mind that I don't.

I honestly do not like systemd, either. It is okay for managing processes but I wish it didn't spread into everything else in the machine.

Or if it must, could it actually work cohesively across their concepts? Would be nice to have an obvious and easy way to run Quadlet as its own user to isolate further, would be nice to have systemd-sysusers present in /etc/subuid so they can run containers.

I like what they are doing with atomic distros. It would be great to have a single file declarative setup for something like running a containerized reverse HTTP proxy with an isolated user. Instead of "atomic" but you manually edit files in /etc after install.