That sounds like a pain for my desktop, but implies there's still hope to use a simpler init on my servers so long as the coupling doesn't increase.
That's what I've found at least, their rc system is dead simple, like Arch used to be before they started making changes to allow for systemd. I miss the day's of arch's rc.conf.
No need to be quite so weaselly: 'Many disagree...' is something I'm pretty sure you could provide references for if pressed.
Also, what's so bad about coredumps? You can disable storing them in the journal, discarding them or saving them in a separate location (which is the default). Where coredumps are rare (which I guess it's the case in most of the deployments) it seem nice having a clean, standardized way to manage them.
This is the same thing I see about HTTP/2. It's good to finally remove a huge number of parsing errors and inefficiencies!
I've been solving this problem by writing a non-pretty printed JSON blob to one line in a log file. Structured, but still text and very easy to stream. I build a separate binary index that gives more efficient time based lookups, but it isn't needed to understand and process the log file.
systemd is the launchd for Linux I've been wanting for years.