I feel obligated to mention that I run Arch and have done for a long time :).

About the upstart thing... even the creator of Upstart acknowledged that systemd's design is more sound -- on Canonical's bug tracker no less -- and kudos to him for doing that. TL;DR: Upstart was essentially callback hell in a different form.

... but to GP: my point wasn't really about when projects were started per se, but they should have been ended much sooner than they were. I absolutely support innovation around the platform, but maybe we shouldn't be too stubborn.