That makes no sense. We had a perfectly working init called System V init. That's an alternative here, you may be looking at the wrong operating system.

A lot of the complexity comes from how flexible it is.

I think the complexity comes from trying to do too much at once. It's an init, but also cron. It's still an init, but also inetd. But it is still init, yet also acpid. Although it is in fact, still init, it's also atd.

And all of its functionality is available as a DBUS API. The only users are developers writing programs, not anyone banging their keyboards at the commandline prompt. That flies into the face of everything that made GNU/Linux great. Dbus is the death of GNU as we know it. The *sh oneliner that uses pipes and plain works is much better than the far more efficient C (or programming language du jour) program, even if it's only 10 lines of code.