The "Devuan" Debian fork

In general I agree with your comment, except for the fact that you call the idea of specifying the exact dependencies "systemd-ish". It isn't. It (in the form of LSB headers) predates both systemd and upstart.

And in many contexts (in particular, in clusters where the service depends on something remote) trying and retrying until success is indeed the only working solution. The only possible disagreement here is whether such retrying should be done by the service or by the service manager, but I don't have a strong opinion here.