Comment 8 for bug 1174272

That is the point though. If retaining conventions of the past is such an important factor, then I wonder why I could (until recently, at least) issue 'shutdown now' or 'reboot now' on any machine running debian/ubuntu, and it would complete a full power-off, or reset, respectively, each time...
If you wish to insist that, well, I was 'doing it wrong' for what could well be 20+ years in my case prior to these changes, then I am happily to concede that. However, if that is the case, then I wish know why it behaved the way I have described until these recent changes. You see, these bugs (1174272 & 1065851) were confirmed by others, implying that others have also experienced the 'unexpected' (unintuivie/'buggy') effects of these changes. If indeed shutdown only powers-off when '-h/-H' is used, and reboot is expected to revert to single-user mode when 'now' is supplied as an argument [who would have thought...?]) then it would seem that the method I've used for the past 20+ years, or to rephrase: 'the way shutdown has worked' for at least the last couple of years, that I can recall, has been recently changed? Surely mere convention is no excuse to obstruct progress to code in any case...