It is possible I haven't communicated the gist of the idea.

systemd is functional. It does the things you say. It unifies things, including config files and log files. It works for you.

I just don't think the way it did this is that elegant.

My busybox analogy should be more viewed as: what if arch/ubuntu/rh decided that busybox would replace all coreutils, etc on their systems today? All the same commands. Still usable. But something is missing...