I am well aware of the alternatives and use daemontools on a couple of my own machines.

However, the fact remains that inittab is installed by default by all Linux distributions out there. Thus, is has to be considered the standard init system on Linux. If you can convince the maintainers of Redhat, Debian, Suse etc. to switch systems to daemontools I'll applaud you and gladly call it the standard system, but until then naysaying the existence of a standard init system just smacks of blind DJB-idolatry.

More to the point of my reply, if someone is new to Linux and has used inittab on a different UNIX in the past, and asks about the particulars of using it under Linux, then IMO it is unhelpful to point out the existence of one alternative system which is very much different and not at all globally accepted in the community. If you'd pointed out others and warned that switching can lead to severe problems with one's system as well, I would not have complained.

'Nuff said, it's getting increasingly pointless to reply to a deleted and offtopic node.

P.S. on a lighter note: I believe you mean expound, not expunge ;-)