Docker containers /in principle/ do work with systemd. They are implemented as transient units when you use --exec-opt native.cgroupdriver=systemd (in your daemon's cmdline). I've been working on getting this support much better (in runC and therefore in Docker), however systemd just has bad support for many of the new cgroups when creating transient units.

So really, Docker has systemd support. Systemd doesn't have decent support for all of the cgroup knobs that libcontainer needs (not to mention that systemd has no support for namespaces). I'd recommend pushing systemd to improve their transient unit knobs.

But I'd rather like to know why the standard cgroupfs driver doesn't fulfil your needs? The main issues we've had with systemd was that it seems to have a mind of it's own (it randomly swaps cgroups and has its own ideas about how things should be run).