Not really, remember daemontools? There are almost a hundred init systems very superior technically compared to sysv and systemd, the truth is that sysv has NEVER been considered the best.
Parallel boot, sure. But you can always drop runit or openrc or something similar on top and get it already.
socket based service start, (hardware) event based, pass.
Frankly the core of sysv, the init binary, does very little. It sets up virtual terminals and fires up one or more processes (that it will keep an eye on and maybe restart).
The latter processe(s), most commonly a shell script of some kind, are what do the actual starting of "services" and managing of runlevels etc.
This is a very flexible system, as most of the logic involved is easy to get at. It is housed in interpreted scripts rather than compiled C code.
you can even run the scripts directly in a root shell if you have the need to do so (or perform the scripted commands manually).
Basically the scripts do little more than what someone would do manually if they were presented with a bare shell after kernel boot.
You'd probably have some of the same people complaining if you tried to "evolve" SysV.
I guess things are pretty good right now in the Linux world if this is the thing to argue over.