Technically I don't have to accept it until 2020 ;-)
(and FreeBSD has declared they will never use it, which to be fair is easy for them to declare since they cannot use it because it requires posix) (correction: not posix, cgroups and udev)
You don't really ever have to accept it. Go grab the sysvinit source and run it. Have fun managing everything yourself. Ditto for copying a simple rc system like Slackware or OpenBSD provide. For that matter, throw out everything, declare dependencies and solve the problem with prolog. The thing is, once you deviate from the norm on linux, you just have to understand things at a deeper level. Not impossible, but IMO maintaining your own custom distro gets old after awhile.