The good people over at Infoworld have published a story outlining why they feel systemd is a disaster.
Excerpt from Infoworld:
While systemd has succeeded in its original goals, it's not stopping there. systemd is becoming the Svchost of Linux—which I don't think most Linux folks want. You see, systemd is growing, like wildfire, well outside the bounds of enhancing the Linux boot experience. systemd wants to control most, if not all, of the fundamental functional aspects of a Linux system—from authentication to mounting shares to network configuration to syslog to cron. It wants to do so as essentially a monolithic entity that obscures what's happening behind the scenes.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 20 2014, @03:22PM
I know when support runs out for Ubuntu/Xubuntu 12.04 LTS, I'll be looking at Slackware and Gentoo for my servers, desktop, and laptop. Of course, I'd consider other distros that are systemd free, using the apt package manager would be a boon. Sure I could go Debian and select the init packages, but after reading the install process and the need for the systemd shim, I'd rather just learn a new package manager or compile from source.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base