Re: Why LTS?
"Plenty of people complain about systemd"
Yes they do and its usually for specious, wrong or refutable reasons. Or because they're trolling.
"A simple but well tested and highly reliable component has been replaced with various iterations of "ooh! shiny shiny!"."
Linux has always been about reinvention. How many times has the kernel been rewritten? How many desktops are there for it and how many times have they been rewritten? How many calculators, browsers, file managers and all the rest are there for it? Even now there is a concerted effort to get replace X with Wayland (or Mir). There is barely a part of the core which hasn't been rewritten multiple times to improve performance or to remove some arcane, baroque, incomplete or broken behaviour. Why should the user-land bootstrap be exempt from this?
Regarding upstart, it was an improvement on sysvinit, but it was still thought to start things unnecessarily because it was event driven. e.g. network-manager's conf listened on dbus to start but just because dbus ran didn't mean anyone wanted to start network-manager. Systemd is dependency based so services are launched explicitly systemd ensures all the dependencies are started first.
Secondly, systemd isn't new software. It's been in some distributions for six years now and even enterprise dists like RHEL have used it for 2. They use it because it is reliable, it fixes longstanding issues with sysvinit/upstart, it enforces security via cgroups and minimal privilege and it's more efficient.