Thanks for asking! I've always used the "default" init system when trying a new distro, and while I enjoyed running systemd on Fedora, I've also enjoyed working with OpenRC on Gentoo and with Shepherd on GNU Guix. I've tinkered a lot with early boot, writing my own initrds, curating system services under each of these init's.
systemd is undeniably powerful, but I enjoy how broad the ecosystem is. Off the top of my head, I personally like having real logfiles under `/var/log`, which I've occasionally had to examine by mounting the disk on another machine after really mucking something up :p
