I developed an (unjust) animosity for systemd when a `pacman -Syu` installed it and broke my Arch system (which relied on a small password-prompt initscript written by me that I had completely forgotten about) but when I took a fresh look it didn't look bad. I have only a year of so of real GNU/Linux experience so take this with a grain of salt, but I think that even if systemd's got problems, they're not related to it being too monolithic. And although I haven't really measured, my ancient Atom-based MSI netbook seems to boot way faster than with initscripts.