Upstart and systemd provide tons and tons of other features though. Restarting of crashed processes, dependencies, etc.. They also generally have much more simple config files instead of start up scripts. I don't know how many crappy startup scripts I've seen over the years, when in practice: set these environment variables, execute this program as this user with these arguments is 95+% of what's needed.
Much much much more straight forward to have some specially formatted comments (?!hahaha, that's the UNIX spirit!) to determine the boot priority and then source some files to read some arbitrary variables and construct the command line that you're interested in running with complete abstraction.
The other functionality may be nice, but 1) it's got no place in init and 2) really complicates a key piece of system infrastructure. Complexity and change are the two dual enemies of stability. As an old-fart ops type, with scars on my hide and notches on my belt, I really hate both change and complexity. The mess with my nines.
Arch and Fedora are relatively wide of my usual ambit, but I've learned in my years to be wary of what others ask for -- you may get it and have to live with the consequences (see: GNOME).
Upstart and systemd provide tons and tons of other features though. Restarting of crashed processes, dependencies, etc.. They also generally have much more simple config files instead of start up scripts. I don't know how many crappy startup scripts I've seen over the years, when in practice: set these environment variables, execute this program as this user with these arguments is 95+% of what's needed.
Much much much more straight forward to have some specially formatted comments (?!hahaha, that's the UNIX spirit!) to determine the boot priority and then source some files to read some arbitrary variables and construct the command line that you're interested in running with complete abstraction.