I have to disagree. I've written some stupidly big init.d scripts in my time. Replacing them with:
[Unit]
Description=My dumb script
[Service]
Exec=/usr/local/bin/dumb-script
And no longer caring about PIDs, forking, etc. has been very refreshing.
I agree, however, that systemd feels too monolithic, and I question the wisdom behind journald.