Have you ever written an init script? As an admin you should have written one or two in your day. You'll know how fragile init scripts are, reinventing the wheel over and over again to do basic things like prevent a service from running twice. Want to restart a service automatically when it crashes? Well you hack another script that runs in a cron that uses hackish ways of determining if the daemon has crashed: Check for a running process, find out if it's responding, kill it if necessary, start it again. Gets unsupportable in a hurry on production systems. So we resort to third party solutions like supervisord, which work pretty well, but aren't integrated into the init system at all, so they don't obey runlevels. The two largest unix vendors have not shipped sysv init for many years. Solaris replaced it with SMF, and Apple with LaunchDaemon. systemd is superior to both systems.
As an admin surely you can see the benefit to creating simple daemon definition files that can get your daemon up and running (with restart, with protection against multiple instances) all with two or three lines of a simple text config file.
From what I can see systemd is modular, and if you don't want to use journald, you don't have to. On RHEL7 it's set to small, ram-based log for crash reporting only, with the real enterprise-required logging going to rsyslog which is a conventional logging facility.
I personally cannot find fault with Pottering's work. It just works for me (I am an admin also). I also am extremely grateful for pulseaudio also. It just works now, and lets me do things that no other system currently does, like record one program's output to mp3 while listening to music or watching videos. Can't argue with results.