Re: Why LTS?
Ubuntu made systemd the default in 15.04 so there is no "painful transition". It's happened and curiously the world did not collapse. The same is true of virtually every mainstream dist. If you have reason to run a script to launch a daemon you can still do it.
And it's important to note that the old way of starting services in Ubuntu since 6.10 (and Fedora since 9) was upstart, not sysvinit. Not that you would know it from the usual whining about systemd vs sysvinit in this thread.