System-d has better logging. Until you have something that needs to really really log. You can argue that if you have something that's that dependent on logging it shouldn't be logging through the console but it's worked fine for decades. Auto pruning of logs isn't necessarily ideal. Getting console logs and assist logs as a pain in the ass.
Same goes for service dependencies we had this sorted it was answered via run levels and naming. It wasn't necessarily the most elegant solution but it was simple and there was very little to go wrong.
The tools to manage the services and logs are needlessly complicated. Service start, service stop, service status, service log, service enable, service disable. And I shouldn't have to reload the Daemon every time I make a change.
This isn't to say that it's all bad. It's flexible, and for most workflows, it's very automated and very light touch. The other pruning on the log file says probably saved a lot of downtime, a whole lot of downtime.
It's really well suited to desktop.
Service creation is somewhat easier.
Dependencies are more flexible than run levels.
To be honest I wouldn't go out of my way to run in a non-system distro but I would feel a little sigh of relief if something I was screwing with was still init.d