As far as the variety of other tools:
launchd is an interesting concept but hasn't picked up a ton of adoption by things other than OSX.
I've used supervisord for some other projects, but never as the main init system, and the python dependency has thus-far prevented me from doing so: I like my init process to be statically compiled so that the initial system startup has as few deps as possible.
I really enjoyed runit; I'm only trying out s6 now because it has a few more helper tools for controlling process startup and management, and appears to have better support for log handling. Runit was very powerful as an ultra-light-weight init system, and both runit and s6 have very thorough docs, with runit having a large catalog of community-provided initscript examples.
I guess I am asking for a lot, no need to indulge, but if you do, much appreciated.
@akerl_19 Thanks. I have but two upvotes to give.