[CentOS] Centos7 Annoyances

Folks

I'm sure the Centos team has done a yeoman's job getting Centos7 
ready, and that the Redhat team has done marvels in creating rhel7, 
but here's a little voice from a personal hobbyist user.

Background:
  ('ve been maintaining several remote servers since Redhat 6 days, 
migrating from that to Whitebox, then Centos, and things have been 
running as expected including the current version of Centos6.  As an 
experiment, I've tried to play with Centos7 on an in-house virtual 
machine (VMWare on Win7), and have encountered a collection of 
annoyances greater than I've even seen.  Below is a note about 
them.  If someone has some elegant solution, I'd love to try, but 
Centos7 is still unusable for me.

1:  Firewall changes
  The change in firewall technology forced a complete re-do of my 
scripts which maintain firewalls, respond to attacks, etc.  I think 
I've programmed my way around the issues, but it wasn't easy.

2:  Apache changes
  These were subtle, but again were solved.

3:  Service -> systemd
  The change from object-oriented view of service:  (service httpd 
restart) to function-oriented (systemctl restart firewall) seems to 
be unnecessary, and counter to the way stuff is generally done in the 
modern world.  Nonetheless, it was possible to solve that with some 
adaptive script programming.

4) Something with Unknown lvalue 'ControlGroup' in section 'Service'
  I don't know what to do with this.  I constantly get the diagnostic:
    [/usr/lib/systemd/system/rtkit-daemon.service:32] Unknown lvalue 
'ControlGroup' in section 'Service'
  and attempts to browse the internet for solutions come across 
barriers that require some paid subscription to view.  This is 
currently a progress-stopper.  The messages I see deal with boinc, 
which does not show up on my system using "rpm -qa | grep -i boinc".

5) Sendmail is out, postfix is in.
  This is a huge change, since I had lots of scripts that tailored 
the Sendmail system for spam protection, dealing with SmartHosts that 
required SMTP-AUTH and others required weird configurations, 
etc.  Whether this is working yet I don't quite know, but it seems 
the scripts can accommodate the change.

6) Installation
  I have no idea why, when using the net-install, one must explicitly 
turn on the network.  It seems unnecessary.

7) Lack of 32-bit support
  I think I understand this.  After all, 32-bit machines may become 
"unusable" when the clock overflows, but isn't that a few years away, 
and couldn't some solution be found, even if kludgy?  Some of the 
32-bit hardware was of very high quality, and still runs 
perfectly.  I'd hate to spend a few hundred dollars each to replace 
all those systems.

8) And more
  ...



I haven't got a server or desktop running to my satisfaction yet, so 
I don't yet know what pitfalls await.  Any advice would be appreciated.

David in San Francisco