There is no such "established-over-decades code in scripts" in the real world, which is why sysadmins around the world constantly had to tinker with these scripts. This is also the exact reason why if no one cares about them, these init scripts will wither and die.
The most important plumbing init scripts are flawed by design, init is flawed in a dynamic environment like the one created by the Linux kernel, which is why everyone wanted to flee it since a long time. But sysadmins and distro makers couldn't agree on anything until systemd.

Actually, systemd doesn't tie into how to configure your soundcard, but if you don't understand what people are talking about, especially systemd opponents, I see why you would think that. You must believe pulseaudio is part of systemd I gather.

I don't understand why you're talking about Windows here as a party, you're not making any sense.
systemd is free software, so I assure you that you don't have to deal with undebuggable binaries, as the code to these binaries is readily available. Exactly like the source code of sysvinit or the numerous daemons launched by the scripts you're talking about.
Perhaps you believe the init scripts themselves were serving as daemons, but that's rarely the case : these scripts were just there to try (badly) to understand the context to then launch "undebuggable binaries".

I don't understand what is scary about that. Your system depends on lots of binaries working as expected, starting with your bootloader, your kernel, your daemons, ...
That's the job of a sysadmin, I can assure you they're not scared at all providing they know what they are doing.

Actually you can still do that with systemd, but even better than before, especially when your keyboard is not qwerty or your character encoding not ASCII.

Why? I'm on the second side and I do exactly as advertised, even better than with sysvinit.

This was always the case in Linux, like most of the Linux plumbing ecosystem, which is not a bad thing imho, as long as the projects are active.

You are plain wrong added to the fact that you're not a good sysadmin then, or one with very little experience if any.
You need a threshold of time to know if your server will go up or not.
Guess what, a server won't always go up for various reasons, especially when you have init.d scripts patched everywhere with various timeouts, that can break at any reboot. You need to monitor your server startup, and it starts to become tedious when you have tens of server startup to monitor.

There is no so called "linux design principle" of do one thing and do it well, and even if there was, it would be the contrary of what you're saying as Linux (the kernel) has a monolithic design. In the case you were talking about GNU, systemd uses the same design as most GNU software, which is a "software collection".
There is no linux principle of "everything is a text file", this is pure nonsense as sure enough, not everything in Linux is a text file (just look at sockets or block devices).
There is a Unix principle that says everything is a file, but not a "text file". You're mixing several things without understanding the purpose of what you're talking about.
Anyway, guess what, outside the United States, often the classic log files are actually binary files. Because what you describe as "text files" are actually "ASCII files" which is an encoding, but if your kernel or tools don't support UTF-8 encoding which is mostly used on Linux, you will extract mostly garbage from log files (all of mine are UTF-8 files, and yes I have log files despite using systemd). But that's nitpicking, binary log files are not a problem with systemd as you can use classic "text files" juste the same with systemd.
Finally, there's no "single subsystem" that takes a large number of roles with systemd, each subsystem in systemd has one role.

Actually, systemd is an actual huge upgrade for system administrators who manage servers, in the actual world, not in an hypothetical one.
The problem is that actual administrators, to switch to systemd, will have to manage the more or less huge number of hacks they inserted into deficient init.d scripts, which can be a huge tasks depending on if they documented them or not. And probably most didn't...

Your understanding is wrong, but you're not to blame, it's understandable because those opposed to systemd have no other argument than to make you believe all the components you cited are integrated into one tool/process. Of course this is false.
systemd, the PID 1 process, manages initializing processes on bootup and scheduling jobs after boot-up, like sysvinit. It has lots of features to do these tasks even when the environment dynamically changes.
Maintaining logs is in another process, managing devices alo in another process, managing network devices in another process ...
So actually, if that's your definition of Unix "philosophy", systemd pretty much is adequate.
There is no Linux "philosophy", but you believe that because Unix "philosophy" (which has as many meanings as there are people using these words) is used to attack systemd, as if Linux and Unix were the same things. Actually, Linux (and GNU) by itself already detracts from Unix in lots of ways already.

And yet that's exactly what I'm doing today on my systems, which I build from scratch. And I grok the entire operating system, systemd was a god send tool for me.
I run in a setup where multiple graphical sessions run on one computer, which only Linux allow me to do very easily.

There is one exception though : polkit. It is the only tool on my systems that I never tried to completely understand. Now I don't even need to anymore with udev + systemd. And I bet that's where the op is having problems, as it was fixed by installing systemd.

And the outcome is pretty good as Linux runs on every computer available to this day, be it embedded or phones or HPC. So I don't understand what you mean by poor management, are they able to do that in poor management companies?

You're just new to this: Free Software is like that since it started, what you say is laughable to people used to FOSS. You talk like you just discovered FOSS.

Should you use Windows or OSX? Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008?
When you get Ubuntu, you know what you get just as much as when you get OSX, you even can test it without installing anything.
You're juste spewing fallacies here.

You must be young as what you say is patently false, especially in Windows. Nearly everything I learned in Windows 98 was made useless when Windows XP came, including most of my work environment. I can say the same with Windows NT to Windows Server 2003. While nearly everything I learned in school on Unix 20 years ago is still usable today on Linux which is not even Unix.

This is what distro do, it's nothing new, it's just you discovering it now, but everything you're saying has already been done and evolved since then.

It's funny you say that, as systemd is about putting back text (systemd units) instead of lots of binary stuff everywhere (init scripts).

Not on my Linux, and I use systemd. I mean it's integrated and I do not have one single process which does everything.

So you will need systemd on your servers, especially if you want focus on security. The Linux kernel provides dynamic interfaces since a long time, and no one in userspace provided the tools to cope with it until systemd. Devices was done with udev and its predecessor devfs, but init was unable to cope with it before systemd, despite higher level tools trying to cope with the linux kernel dynamic nature.

No, anecdotes never lead to facts even if you have millions of them. You can't even say facts of what. Only analysis of anecdotes can lead to facts.
This is becoming ridiculous, pushing dogmatic thoughts like that is dangerous.

This is pure lie that can be debunked by just looking at the devel ML.
Why systemd haters always have to rely on lies?

No, the reason is that the unstable distro these people are using is really unstable, but they are too young to have experienced previous big breaks in GNU/Linux distro, like udev predecessor, kernel 2.2 to 2.4, 2.4 to 2.6, 2.6 to 3.0, 3.3 to 3.4, Gnome to Gnome 2, Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, ...
systemd is far from being the biggest change and challenge in Linux since I've worked with it starting in 1999, it's actually a breeze that no decent admin that know several Unix + Linux should trip on.

When I read this I could be made to believe I'm a genius. This is wrong on so many levels, the first one being that things didn't work before, things were duct taped constantly by distro providers or by admins. Which is why the first thing systemd haters talk about is being able to tweak their initscripts, because the secret to unknowing people is that the basic distros just don't work with their setup, which has to be tweaked with ugly hacks for every specific environment.
It becomes a hell to maintain and every distro upgrade is at risk of failing very badly or erasing their change.
Usually what happens is that you forget about it, then when it blows up, blame the distro, and then quickly flee in shame when you realise it was all your fault to begin with. Now these admins blame systemd for their faults, the good ones come regularly to the ML to see their problem fixed.
Fortunately systemd is part of the fix for this mess.

In the OP, it's the opposite: the computer is more useful today than it was before thanks to systemd getting installed, so the problem is solely with something else.
Which makes sense since a distro upgrade is not just systemd being upgraded, contrary to belief of non proficient people.

perhaps he shuts them down because he specifically said that installing systemd solved his problem but he doesn't know why.
Yet people with logic problems claim systemd is the problem, despite the fact that it wasn't installed on the systems experiencing the problem.

As it has been adopted by most distro, you're obviously wrong with your rhetoric. It has been one of the most cohesive force actually.

systemd doesn't have the power to force anyone to do anything, people that went to BSD did this on their own will.
Debian community has not been torn by systemd but by trolls actually, systemd was the point used by the trolls.
And usually, victims are unwilling to be victims, or so I heard.

I won't take your word for it on this, only time will tell but I'm pretty sure what you say is just plain hyperbole.
Competent sysadmins actually have no problem with systemd, on the contrary.

I've run my own Linux From Scratch like system since 2001, and I can say your advice is a very bad one.
The problem is that the kernel provides dynamic interfaces since a long time. If you do what you say here, you will have a very limited setup that must not be a moving target, or take the risk of seeing your OS not boot very often, or even lose data (I had several of these problems before systemd). Your setup also has to be a very basic one.
Even your network interfaces or your disks can appear too late for your script on a very basic setup.
systemd is an answer to all this actually: it finally puts the dynamic parts in userspace needed to correctly handle the dynamic kernel.

The problems the OP is seeing, I've crashed into several years ago, and it's basically a documentation problem.
Some of the plumbing tools used for DE (like polkit or accountsservice) are badly documented, sometimes badly designed, sometimes with incomplete options (fixed in the latest versions of accountsservice) and the worst is that there is no howto that I could find explaining the big picture of how it all works together: everything is buried in various development ML. I had to basically reverse engineer nearly everything to understand how it works, mostly because as I compile everything from upstream, the DE like Gnome and KDE would just not start without everything in the right place and well configured.
Gnome 3 and KDE 4 were the worst upgrades for me, I delayed them a lot.
So what the OP discovered is actually nothing new, and I agree but only for security related plumbing needed for DE and user sessions.

This /etc/network/interfaces which is distro specific that you talk about, is exactly one of the configuration for which a replacement is proposed by the systemd you talk about below:

Yes, in systemd it exists, nowhere else for now.

No it's not, you don't understand what you're talking about. The kernel doesn't configure your network interface for you, it just manages the device.

It sure enough removes complexity from the OS if you use every control systemd allows.

Who is "us"?
I sure enough am not part of the people you're talking about, and most of the Linux community, those that develop software and manage most distributions, have switched to systemd. If you care about the linux community, then you should come join us in the real world and quit your fantasy land.
Linux never had this principal of doing one thing well, that's a laughable statement.Linux actually does lots of things well and even better, as is systemd.
If Debian unstable is above your proficiency level, then wait for the stable releases.
It's not even about Debian here, it's about upstream systemd, that you won't see before long unless you run your own OS and compile everything from upstream like I do, or use a distro like Gentoo which is very up to date.