Hi, Clarke!

>It was a bit of a wake up call for me as it made me realize that for
>more recent hardware continued use of Wheezy to avoid systemd may not be
>as simple as it first seems.

You can get around that. Systemd is not a kernel requirement. You can easily get around said problems by compiling your own kernel rather than using the Debian packages - which clearly have dependency issues related to systemd.