systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

> yes, but it's one that sysadmins are very familiar with. They need it and use it for all sort of other things so your objection really doesn't matter.
Oh, it very much does. Writing sh scripts is much harder than writing simple ini-style configuration files even if you know sh. And actually, many admins know it barely enough to somehow get by. When did you last meet a sysadmin who knows the difference between cat << EOF and cat << "EOF"?