Upstart is pretty similarly easy to use in my limited experience with it. Definitely a nice idea to have stdout just automatically go to a log file.
You still write shell scripts, but you also still have control.
Again, I'm not entirely opposed to the ideas behind systemd, but I am opposed to basically every fucking Linux server distribution breaking because of things people are doing for the desktop, which began with upstart.
There is also no love left to lose between me and sysV init scripts.
The only difference is acceptance.