When bitcoind is started from a terminal with the -printtoconsole switch (e.g. bitcoind -daemon -server -printtconsole) it prints a few lines and then exits, the daemon continues to run and accept RPC commands but no debugging info is printed on the screen as it should be.
bitcoin-qt behaves as it should, the problem is only with bitcoind. I have tested this with the official build of v0.14.0 (64-bit) on linux and the MacPorts build of the same version on macOS.
Don't combine -daemon and -printtoconsole. They do opposite things. -daemon detaches the process from the terminal, -printtoconsole prints to the terminal. You just won't see it because the process has no controlling terminal anymore.
The reason that it works for the GUI is because -daemon is ignored for that. Daemons are background processes, while GUIs are decidedly foreground processes.
I have just tried the command with the -daemon switch removed and it is still failing. This also does not explain why this argument combination works with previous versions of bitcoind and with other altcoins such as litecoind.
Removing daemon=1 from the bitcoin.conf as well, does now make it behave as it should. However, it still does not explain why it works with other versions and coins. This must be a change to the 0.14 code which enforces the proper behaviour of the -daemon switch, were it was overlooked before. It should have been mentioned in the release notes.
@UniversalBinary Yes, Bitcoin Core properly daemonizes only since v0.14.0: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/8813
What happens if bitcoind is started with -printtoconsole (not a daemon) but then the terminal is closed (e.g. laptop hibernation). In my view the process keeps on running as daemon then.