Does running "systemctl daemon-reload" before trying to start metasploit help?

That did not seem to change anything here. Ran systemctl daemon-reload, then systemctl (without arguments) and metasploit.service is still not listed in the output, same output in the terminal when attempting to run metasploit.

I should mention this is attempting to run metasploit from the menu rather than at the console. msfconsole runs from the command line without issue.

And I should have mentioned this is metasploit/metasploit-framework 4.11.2-2015051401-1kali0+b1, metasploit-common 1.0.2-0kali0+b1

Just to be clear, there is no metasploit.service file in /lib/systemd/system nor /etc/systemd/system I'm not sure if there are other locations that they can be installed to, but those are the locations that are mentioned in https://wiki.debian.org/systemd/Packaging for service files.

Quite a few .service files are auto-generated from various sources in /run/systemd/ (in particular /run/systemd/generator.late/ for most of the old System V init scripts).

Just checked and metasploit.service does not show up in /run/systemd/generator.late on armhf - it DOES show up there on amd64.

So, I purged metasploit-common, metasploit-framework and metasploit. Upon re-installing, I appear to have /etc/init.d/metasploit now, which in turn causes me to have /run/systemd/generator.late/metasploit.service and it does in fact run properly, so I am going to resolve this as invalid.