Your "much written better than I can" article is about Upstart, not Systemd. They're unrelated init daemons, and it seems like many of the complaints in the article relate specifically to upstart (event-triggered services with no dependencies, minimal scripting support, killing daemons, not all daemons managable by upstart) but do NOT apply to systemd. Systemd has service dependencies, support for old-style init scripts, and can stop daemons with arbitrary commands. Are you confusing the two init systems?

On the other hand, this would be nice: "There is no tool that will print out a dependency map." It's also pretty trivial to implement with a little shell script and graphviz.