Comment 283 for bug 554172

I'm running the updated upstart and plymouth-free grub2 config on two newly installed amd64 boxes (bog-standard Dell 2950s) with today's 2.6.32-24-server kernel, and I'm still finding a whole bunch of services fail to start (cron, apache2, mysql, fail2ban, sysstat, postfix, openntpd, mysql-mmm), along with the unknown runlevel issue. All of them (except sysstat for some reason) start fine if I run telinit 2. One of them reported the localhost interface breakage, but the other did not.
It doesn't seem likely that all of these major, common packages have bugs with identical symptoms - it's got to be a problem with upstart - so reporting bugs on the packages is probably a waste of time.
This is a really major problem as it can (and does for us) render servers non-functional and insecure by default - why is it marked as 'wontfix' and downgraded from critical with no obvious pointer to a better bug?