Regarding (1), I'll echo everything meaty said, and add that basic shell scripting is a valuable and generally useful tool to have anyway, so I'm skeptical of the benefits of replacing them with another, slightly different configuration file format.
For example: we use backuppc for automated network and remote server backups. The backuppc data volume is a TrueCrypt-encrypted drive. Creating an init script that checked to make sure that the volume was present and mounted before launching the backup daemon was fairly straightforward. I understand that I could still do this in systemd, but the catch is that I would have to do it with a shell script -- the same way I am now, except for a different, alien interface -- because the native system doesn't have support for things like that. (This is assuming that some combination of unit config parameters couldn't do it; the commands for finding the drive and checking its status were a little fiddly, and I honestly haven't tried to do this the systemd way. Still though: once you understand shell scripting, you can do anything on Linux.)
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Regarding (1), I'll echo everything meaty said, and add that basic shell scripting is a valuable and generally useful tool to have anyway, so I'm skeptical of the benefits of replacing them with another, slightly different configuration file format.
For example: we use backuppc for automated network and remote server backups. The backuppc data volume is a TrueCrypt-encrypted drive. Creating an init script that checked to make sure that the volume was present and mounted before launching the backup daemon was fairly straightforward. I understand that I could still do this in systemd, but the catch is that I would have to do it with a shell script -- the same way I am now, except for a different, alien interface -- because the native system doesn't have support for things like that. (This is assuming that some combination of unit config parameters couldn't do it; the commands for finding the drive and checking its status were a little fiddly, and I honestly haven't tried to do this the systemd way. Still though: once you understand shell scripting, you can do anything on Linux.)