Opponents of systemd aren't opposed to smarter dependency tracking at boot time. We're opposed to vendor lock-in (making desktop environments and regular GUI applications dependent upon it), an intentional and strong lack of portability (especially important given the former), pushing software into production servers before it is stable and mature, the backroom politics involved in this displacing other competing technologies (OpenRC, upstart, etc), the move to corruptible binary log files, the assimilation and/or replacement of countless other services that already have more mature and stable implementations (consoled, hostnamed, journald, localed, logind, networkd, resolved, shutdownd, timedated, timesyncd, udev, etc), the PID 1 requirement, coupling itself tighter with the kernel (cgroups changes just for it, kdbus, etc), the aggressive and hostile attitudes of the lead developers (Poettering and Sievers in particular), the complete lack of choice being provided from nearly all major distros, Debian dismissing their heritage as a rock-solid, stable, conservative distro, on and on.
Further, rc.d really isn't anywhere near as bad as SysVinit. See an example of an rc.d script here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/rc-scripting/rcng-ho... (and even with how tiny it is, most of those lines aren't necessary for your average script, either.)
Further, rc.d really isn't anywhere near as bad as SysVinit. See an example of an rc.d script here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/rc-scripting/rcng-ho... (and even with how tiny it is, most of those lines aren't necessary for your average script, either.)