"Clean, sparse, intuitive, and discoverable"? I have yet to meet a single non-broken production init script that merits a single one of those adjectives.
That's exactly my point. Systemd had a chance to replace the arcane cruft of sysvinit with something clean and well designed, but instead they developed something almost as arcane and unusable.
It's pointless arcana to boot. There is no reason whatsoever that a green field implementation of something so straightforward needs to be so obtuse.
If the complexity of interface exceeds the complexity of the information it needs to take and provide, it's bad design. If the command or UI structure uses arcane terms when straightforward terms exist, it's bad design.
I've used plenty of init-scripts that are named after the daemon in question, support start/stop/reload/status and work fine. What more do you generally need?
The "work fine" part tends to break down horribly the moment something unexpected happens. E.g. pid files being left lying around and breaking restarts.
