The problem that I can see is not that systemd and other new systems are complex. They deal with complex problems. The problem is that the old stuff stays around, so a distribution like Ubuntu keeps growing in complexity and obscurity. My Ubuntu laptop and the couple of Debian servers that I take care of have systemd, which is fine, and I’m happily using it. But they also still have an init.d directory, are still running cron, etc., etc. It’s not coherent. When I have to use strace to spy on my system to I can figure out how to configure it, something’s wrong. And it’s not just the init system. My laptop’s sound is much more reliable after I removed PulseAudio, because it seemed to be fighting with alsa, or something else.