I've got to agree with a lot of your points here, to paraphrase churchill, systemd is the worst system management daemon system that we have, except for all those other ones that have been tried from time to time. (this sounds a little harsh to the other ones, but I find systemd intuitive from a user-facing perspective even if it does have a lot of inelegance under the hood)
[0] http://wais.stanford.edu/Democracy/democracy_DemocracyAndChu...
