Whoops. My bad with the math. systemd is a bunch of purpose-built libraries though so I don't follow your reasoning. In fact, by comparison you should have more of a problem with the Linux kernel - 28 million lines of code in largely a single executable.

The init binary of systemd itself is ~70k if my math is correct & still has a much richer feature set.

I don't know what init.d shell scripts you've been looking at but my experience has not been as pleasant. Also, if you as an end user are looking at init scripts there's something massively wrong with the init system. Never heard of Ganglia but they seem to be on github. Have you filed a ticket with them? Have you messaged them on whatever forum/IRC the devs hang out on with your issue?