It's too bad that opposition to changes like this is often expressed so trollishly. There's a real tradeoff here (of simplicity and of portability) that gets glossed over.
It's certainly true that the "minimal summary" of the features of systemd vs. sysvinit (or Busybox, or a BSD init script, which is even simpler) is hugely skewed against systemd. Understanding how systemd's process tracking works requires understanding cgroups, for example. Things that used to be one liners in a script ("mount hugetlbfs -t hugetlbfs /dev/hugepages") suddenly become first class "mount" objects with status. Systemd introduces a bunch of new jargon and new tools.
But at the same time systemd really does do much more than a classic "launch some stuff and call wait()" style init. And that stuff is pretty nice -- in a systemd world, no one needs to worry about writing a "daemon" any more. Any program that sits in a loop writing to standard output can be started, stopped and syslog'd.
And making this work isn't bad at all. You configure systemd with straightforward .ini file syntax and clear fields (e.g. "ExecStart=/path/to/my/program").
Basically it's complicated in structure (and the task of porting a whole distro to it strikes me as pretty scary) but simple in interface, and that's pretty much the right place to be. Most "systemd is too hard!" rants don't survive long past the initial implementation phase.
The trade off isn't simplicity it's familiarity. The shell based init system is a stuningly complex series of shell scripts that keep implementing the same basic functionality over and over.
