sooo... don't remove /bin/plymouth (say, by uninstalling the "plymouth" package) and still expect your system to boot. Oh yeah, there's no warning when you removed the plymouth package a week or two ago. And there's nothing on screen to indicate what the problem might be, you *must* have a root password set (sorry, Debian and Ubuntu users who didn't do that) in order to log into safe mode, run "journalctl -xb" and see the error where being unable to execute /bin/plymouth is a FATAL error.
Yup, this systemd thing sure makes booting my systems a lot faster... *&^%$#@!
(And if anyone noticed that the new MUUG mirror server was down for a while tonight, systemd is the culprit. It also doesn't like filesystems that take more than a few seconds to mount and/or fsck. Which would not include a 40TB XFS LVM volume. *&^%$#@! again.)