I have no idea. Like I said, I was only a casual observer of the rally against systemd. I get the feeling that the opposition was more about ethos than any irrefutable technical argument.
Init also took a VERY long time to start, and had very, very rudimentary concepts of dependencies.
If it didn't need an update why did various parties try and replace it e.g. OSX launchd, Solaris SMF, Ubuntu Upstart?