... the way systemd has turned into something similar to the bloated beast that is the Windows 'svchost.exe'
+1 to the anti-systemd sentiment.
-1 to using svchost.exe to make your case. svchost is just a container process. The real issue is the Windows architecture/philosophy that encourages a proliferation of services.
(I like Unix and I like Windows. Each has their place. Trying to turn one into the other is a big mistake.)
Let me preface this with the fact that I'm an intellectual property specialist. I bill $450/hour, and still have lots of time to work on my startup without having to take venture capital.
I thought about some educational answers for your questions, but the insult at the start of your comment rubs me wrong and I decided I don't owe you anything. So, I'll save them.
The first symptom of a new but incomplete understanding of patents is gold fever. That is when you have an idea that what you are holding is extremely valuable and that you must protect it from others at all costs. People tend to get irrational about it.
So here is some reality: The fact that you have even published your video (which is "use in commerce" under patent law) invalidates future patents that you might file on that same art. Then there is the prior art (including art you are not aware of), and the recent court finding in Alice v. CLS Bank that invalidates most process and method patents which describe software. These all work against the potential that your thesis is going to make you rich through patent licensing.
You can get a patent awarded, perhaps, that you can use to hoodwink an investor, but forcing an automotive company to pay you? Much less likely and it will cost $10 Million in attorney fees to get there.
Probably your school wants 51% of the revenue and your grant funding sources (and those of your college department) may have their own policies on patents.
systemd is written in C. Terse, poorly commented C. The non-type-safe language with an abysmal history of buffer overflows, by a team of muppets responsible for some of the most bug-ridden, garbage the Linux world has ever seen included in a major distribution (Pulse Audio).
Excuse me if my confidence is not there.
Init scripts, be they BSD style or sysV style can be easily customized, extended, replaced or de-bugged by anyone with a modicum of shell scripting experience. They have not proven to be a cross-platform compatibility problem, as systemd has already.
In 20 years of dealing with plain text unix log files, I am yet to have corruption in them, certainly not to the point where I could not view the logs at least partially.
The fact that these logs are getting corrupted most likely IS due to systemd, the developers simply don't give a fuck. "Assuming the corruption came from another source" is exactly the problem.
Also, what do you do if files are corrupted? You attempt to at least retrieve partial contents. Log files contain valuable information. Or we would not bother logging it!
And you think re-writing from scratch will produce less bugs? Common rookie mistake. Everyone thinks if only they could re-write they could make something better and less buggy off the bat. That is, in the vast majority of cases due to not fully understanding the problem.
Software gets complex due to fixing edge case bugs as they are discovered. Throwing all of that development away, unless you have a fucking good reason is a bad idea.
I've yet to see any "fucking good reason" for systemd doing the things it does. And definitely no way to force it on everyone as default.
To restore a sense of reality, I think Walt Disney should have a Hardluckland. -- Jack Paar