Interestingly, the answer had nothing to do with what I thought it did. rocker/geospatial had nothing to do with this at all - instead, I had found an error in my fstab file that was hanging and preventing any service from initializing.

tl;dr: Services may fail to start if other services which the system relies on have errors. This may be entirely obscured - so check your services and startup scripts, including /etc/fstab errors, to see if anything is blocking the initialization of other services.