I think it's possible that you just hold a non-majority opinion about what good usability looks like. That's fine, and I'm OK with a world where we disagree ab

I think it's possible that you just hold a non-majority opinion about what good usability looks like. That's fine, and I'm OK with a world where we disagree about how usable systemd is, but I interact with the systemd config files and symlinks and logs pretty frequently, and have found them to be orders of magnitude more usable and understandable than /etc/rc#.d and /etc/init.d and "I wonder if this system puts sshd logs in /var/log/auth.log or /var/log/secure or somewhere else". Notably, I interact with a mix of Arch and Ubuntu and RHEL systems over the course of a week, and systemd means I can engage with all of the above using the same methodology. In terms of creep... busybox is noteworthy for packing all of a system into a single binary. systemd doesn't do this. Their resolver and time daemon and networking and all the other bits and bobs are their own separate binary, and you aren't required to use them.