Description of problem: I was quite surprised not to find a bug regarding this already, so here goes: Richard Gooch's simpleinit/need/provide mechanism is clearly more powerful than the current SysVinit scheme, which is a total pain to maintain with its symlink hell. And not only is it cleaner, but faster too! Improving the boot time would rate pretty high on my list (being a laptop user).
We're aware of simpleinit and the need for initscript dependencies, but some investigation showed that the benefits of changing are not yet enough to make this a high priority in the current grand scheme. So, thanks for the idea, but it's not likely to get implemented horribly soon.