I face the very same issue in my day job where I'm struggling to cut the right balance between a featureful data manipulation language with which the customer can implement whatever he needs, as long as he is OK with a bit of programming, or a more limited one for which we have a GUI... and that GUI itself has to be tested, and I'm also currently reviewing QA tools to help testing GUIs, and they basically fall in two camps: those that require one to spend a week learning how to program them, and those that are much more limited but come with a straightforward GUIs...
Before systemd the same conflict happened with network-manager: my network setups were usually custom and out of reach from network-manager that I despised and purged of my desktops first thing after a fresh install. Yet with time network-manager supported more and more use cases and I'm now happy to use it. Maybe one day systemd will also make it possible to add the bits of hackery here and there and we will all be satisfied with it.
For now, if so many users have it easier thanks to systemd, which seems to indeed be the case, then it's still something.