I agree that it is another layer of complexity, but when it works well it's a really good layer of abstraction for user space programs to interact with the kern

I agree that it is another layer of complexity, but when it works well it's a really good layer of abstraction for user space programs to interact with the kernel. It's only when issues arise that the extra layer brings in more complexity. And like GP stated, that's mostly an issue of time needed to eliminate the most serious bugs and for edge cases to be well understood and documented. there were plenty of growing pains at first, but the transition period for any project looking to replace the old init system was going to be a headache no matter what. It does take some time to grok, and it feels monolithic at first, but I actually think that's a good thing. It's composed of many separate binaries that individually conform to the unix philosophy, but they're all distributed, maintained, and released together. You still have tons of configurations options, but you can be confident that standard systemd components are always going to play nicely with each other. The only issue I've really had are the binary logs. If the indexes get messed up it's a pain to access the logs even if though the actual files rarely have issues with corruption. But it's fairly easy to forward messages to syslog if you need.