After all this time, I managed to make my experience with systemd less "worse" than it was. At work, we start using centos 7 (irony, I'm in charge of doing that, and thus explain systemd to my colleagues), and I must say that things don't change that much (mostly because red hat worked hard so it does not).

After forcing myself to use it (on my local work machine as well), here are a few thoughs:

• it just works ™
  
• journalctl still feels painful to use so I keep logs in /var/log
  
• systemd-resolved works, but I have no idea how, or why
  
• systemd-networkd took me some time to understand, but it is easier to configure than plain shell scripts (good for noobs)
  
• all default services work well, which is nice because...
  
• editing services feel hacky, and complex. there are a shitons of variable and files that can change how a service behaves
  

So overall, yeah, systemd works, and you will not notice it most of the time. You will have to learn a new system infrastructure though, that is, IMO, not well though or standardized (Even if you know how service configuration is done, you will still have to learn how networkd is configured, or resolved...)

I think systemd is growing to fast to polish all ots rough edges, and even if it will grow stable enough to, one day, be the single dependency to build a fully fledged distro, it will be hard to manage.

Free the init!