e.g.

have lost count of the number of times have "/etc/init.d/daemon restart" only to find the daemon never stopped properly in the first place, or tried to start again while it was still running and both copies exit.

Often I have to manually kill a daemon because "/etc/init.d/daemon stop" didn't - sometimes without any messages or errors.

Use of killall in init.d scripts also bothers me. Could easily kill processes it is not meant to. e.g. on a virtual container host.

Some init.d scripts I have seen will delete a socket, start the daemon, and then try to chown/chmod the socket, which is very much a race condition. Or something like that.

etc

Yes, sure, well written init.d scripts wouldn't have these problems, however the fact is these problems do get into distributions, and often go unnoticed by the responsible maintainers. "It works for me!"