Without adding too much additional traffic, the ability to go down 
levels with things such as NFS "off" but otherwise maintain the running 
image (and other state variable values), one could isolate and possibly 
identify problems -- without throwing an exception except from any 
additional "failures".  The generated logs, and sometimes a snapshot 
dump, allowed one to track down obscure failures (such as a firmware 
timing defect, in one such issue at one time in the past I had to solve 
-- and a software change in the kernel driver got around the firmware 
issue).

On 1/25/21 3:31 PM, Miles ONeal wrote:
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *FKonstantin said:*
> ...
> 
> | For me, the issues are not policital, but technical:
> 
> Agreed. One of mine is that the surety of being able to drop a lower 
> runlevel and back up is gone. I have always managed my systems the way I 
> learned in the early days (probably from SunOS) where level 2 was 
> multi-user no NFS, level 3 added NFS (and possibly more), and level 5 
> was a GUI.
> Sometimes it is *very handy*​ to be able to go down one or more levels 
> to make changes or solve problems, then come back up. And it's much 
> faster than rebooting beefy modern servers with their extensive hardware 
> checks (or even Fedora on an older home computer).
> For whatever faults it had, SysVInit handled this as well for me over 
> the years as whatever had been in BSD. systemd does not- at least within 
> Fedora and RHEL and its rebuilds.
> 
> -Miles