I always thought systemd was chosen to make life easier for devs. The argument was that it was hard to maintain all the init scripts. Seems reasonable. Also another touted benefit was to bring parity with init systems across more linux distros. Also a reasonable thing.
But there are a lot of things about systemd that a lot of people don't like. And so there are options.
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
