I've been looking at userlessd and it appears to fix a lot of the problems that systemd has. The first fix I noticed was their use of sane filenames. They renamed "-.slice" to "X-.slice". I would have done one better and just named it what it is; "root.slice" which is far more human readable than the either "-.slice" or "X-.slice".
Uselessd also saves the log files in a nice simple ASCII log format. (uselessd is at; http://uselessd.darknedgy.net). Here is what the purpose of uselessd is about;
Uselessd is a project to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.
Uselessd doesn't treat /usr as a root directory and fixes the /usr goofiness of the 'Usermov' brain-deadness wanted by systemd where all of the systemd is located in /usr/lib/systemd forcing /usr to be part of the root filesystemd during boot! Anyway Uselessd really does seem to fix a lot of the complaints I've had with systemd. It seems to build very nicely on Mageia 4. Perhaps Mageia could be one of the breakaway distros that adopts Uselessd over systemd.
Systemd is the most ugly thing I've seen. I feel like I'm one of the people in the fairy tail about the Emperor's New Cloths. Everyone seems to be praising the Emperor's new cloths like they praise systemd as the new savior of Linux. I keep looking and all I see is a naked fat wrinkly old emperor pretending to have new cloths.