I have found that systemd solves many problems. I couldn't care less about boot times, especially on servers. The service startup with dependencies is very nice and easy compared to sysv. You write like 10 lines and it just works. You get status output of the service without having to grep through the log file. Sometimes you don't need a logfile, which makes this even better, as you don't need to use screen/tmux workarounds. You see if a service is running or has exited.

Same for timers. Debugging not running cronjobs is a pain in comparison.

Writing sysv init scripts is so fucking shit, people started to dump everything in /etc/rc.local, especially for earlier RPi versions of Debian.