"a leading provider of phone services inside the nation's prisons and jails"... the summary fails to mention the country at all. Is Slashdot really so US-centric now so it needs no mention?

I am pretty sure those distros who started this spend more money paying systemd developers than they save from writing easier startup scripts.

And what is stopping you from using your stuff the old way with RHEL7? Having init scripts for your daemons that you just copy, etc? Using the old method of logging? Buggy startup process taking out the entire startup, you see that a lot? Hasn't happened for me yet in RHEL7. I'm not saying you should necessarily like systemd, but you can pretty much ignore it and go about your business. Sounds to me like there's more going on behind the scenes than what you're saying, or you're deluding yourself...

one more to go! Microsoft should just kill all mediocre products and focus on the ones that are great. Oh, wait...

So... let me get this straight, you have a system which is easy to use and works just fine, and is written in house. Obviously, you want to change it... because? Jeez.