I see systemd as a framework to define and control services that is much more robust than the old system that relied on scripting conventions. Why the hate? What's people's ideal here?
Fuck that. In the last two years, they have changed at least three times the way that the option to delete the /tmp dir is specified. I understood the configuration, edited it so that it did not delete the /tmp dir automatically; and then, upon an innocent update the old config is overridden and the /tmp dir is magically cleaned! This is infuriating. I have never felt actual, physical, rage against any software in 25 years of using computers. That is, until I met systemd!
I do not really care whether the init system is written in C or scripts. But please, allow me to follow a simple logic. Scripts maybe are not very elegant, but I can follow the init process end-to-end and understand where it does that. I have honestly tried to do that with systemd and it is impossible. And I am quite proficient in reading C code and bash scripts. I have a lot of patience and I am willing to spend a few hours of my free time to understand how a program is configured, by reading code if necessary. But this stuff is just batshit crazy.
I can hear in my mind the smug voices of systemd developers saying "but why do you even want to not delete the tmp files". That's not the fucking point motherfuckers! I just want to control my computer.
Why do you say that? You can even use gnome without systemd, but there are still other desktops.
Beyond that, systemd's extensive scope creep makes the system less robust and more complex than it could be, compared to predecessors which some of us have been working with over a decade, such as the daemontools family (runit, s6, nosh &c.) of supervision systems.