But you are right, adoption is not enthusiastic, which to me is a massive indictment of the design and usability. We'll basically spin wheels until someone gets annoyed with it and does systemd better, or at least more modularized.
My complaint? sudo systemctl <verb> <service> means the verb cannot be autocompleted or introspected like sudo service <service> <verb> could be. May be minor, but it's generally my only interaction with systemd versus init.d, and to me they completely blew the only thing I use. Not a good impression.
I understand that init.d was a cobbled set of scripts, loose conventions, and even some hacks. But the resistance to system.d is so pervasive it cannot just be stubborn unix neckbeards.