It's this kind of crap that scares me away from systemd. I have no problems working with current init structures, so I gain nothing from systemd. It basically just removes options from me, and gives me nothing in return that I actually want.
What we ultimately lose with systemd is modularity. If we cannot upgrade systemd without also upgrading the kernel, then systemd might as well be considered part of the kernel.
Modularity and isolation is at the core of reliability. I think it is worthy discussion if a tradeoff beteween 30 sec and 15 sec boot time is worth that sometimes your boot process might lock up.
I think there was already at least one visible problem with systemd stepping on kernel developer's toes (so to speak) by re-using one of the debug flags.
Heck kernel is monolithic. But thinkign about it, I trust kernel developers a bit more than systemd guys. Maybe it is just a new project and it will stabilize at some point in the future. Now they are kind of shooting from the hip (adding ntp, udev, network socket pools, logging, ... ). That tells me "hello lockups and freezes" and being back in the mid 90s on Windows restarting every day.
The choice isn't between 30sec or 15sec boot times. It's between 30sec, 15sec, or 1sec boot times, the latter coming from dropping all of the crap and writing a flat linear /etc/rc file.
What we ultimately lose with systemd is modularity. If we cannot upgrade systemd without also upgrading the kernel, then systemd might as well be considered part of the kernel.