Almost everything you said is mere brochureware perpetuated by a tribe stronger than the vi mafia.
Sysvinit starts fast, starts well, and doesn’t try to control mounts, cron, Getty, and everything else.
The"but it retries things" whine was a solved problem in 2001. So easy.
The EL6 machines I have in storage start faster than the el7 machines joining them. PCLinuxOS is a very valid non-systemd system that only lacks a documented kickstart emulant.