I've never thought if the unix philosophy as applying to big rich-GUI applications but more to things concerned with the workings of the OS, such as CLI commands you might use in a shell script. There it does have an importance: it enables me to understand what's going on and also to hack it without having to become embroiled in compiled code. Compiled, complex code is a necessary, but if there's too much of it then even a free licensed software OS may become less free in practice in that it requires too much time and knowledge to comprehend and begins to belong to a knowledgeable elite (who could be paid to maintain it for their company). So to me it's a question of balance and I'm concerned the balance is shifting too far with systemd now.