I don't see FreeBSD's init trying to absorb most of the userland system utilities.

Whether or not it is in one repository isn't really the issue at hand here. It is that a bunch of desktop related stuff is worming its way into the systems to the point where you'll be running a whole slew of new, buggy and sloppy code on your servers if you're not very careful just so that the systemd folks get to scratch their NIH itches.

And even when in one repository i think you can grab the BSD utils without getting the kernel and whatsnot in one big tar-ball.

If you try to grab say just the dns daemon from systemd you can't do so directly. you would have to grab the tar-ball for the whole of systemd, and then attempt to extract just the parts dealing with the dns daemon.

Damn it, LFS have found doing this for udev so demanding that they have switched to eudev for their non-systemd edition (yep, they now have their own systemd edition going alongside the "traditional" one).