It's actually because of, I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, distribution maintainer incompetence in the form of not modularizing common script functions, bolting

It's actually because of, I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, distribution maintainer incompetence in the form of not modularizing common script functions, bolting on hacks like start-stop-daemon, startpar and insserv to achieve primitive asynchronicity and service dependencies, and to an extent the failings of sysvinit itself with providing little tools to contain the environment and enforcing messy symlink farms. What you're doing is the equivalent of looking at some old Mach performance statistics and concluding that microkernels cannot possibly work... never mind there's one alongside every smartphone.