>The problem with this traditional unix approach is that in addition to init, pm-utils, inetd, cron, etc you end up having thousands of lines of shell scripts that glue all this together in a big brittle mess.

No, I don't. Typical linux distros may, but I sure as hell don't. I have a very simple, easy to read and debug set of shell scripts that work very well: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/etc/rc?...