There's one thing that the boycott post gets right, that Mr Poettering doesn't address, which is:

> 2. systemd's journal files (handled by journald) are stored in a complicated binary format.

Mr Poettering tackles the myth that configuration files are binary (they are very obviously not).

That said, I am not sure how to get the journaling data in an Upstart system, nor in a sysvinit one.

Also, I highly recommend reading Lennart Poettering's initial description of systemd on his blog [1]. It lays out the paradigms behind systemd design really well. I think that it is important to understand the problems that systemd is trying to solve in order to evaluate whether it is doing it's job well.

[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

it sounds like a lot of the complaints were of the "this makes things easier and smells like it's not the lovechild borne of any arcane hacker and I refuse to read documentation" variety.