Arch has always been a simple distribution in terms of the developer perspective, not the user one. Using systemd made it simpler than ever in that regard because much more work is taken care of by both the systemd developers and all of the projects shipping unit files.
I find systemd easier from an user perspective too. Or ok, let say, a sys-admin one. And I'm talking from my >14 years profesional Linux experience. Wow, has it been so long. 18 years since I first installed Linux (Slackware 3, Debian 2.2, RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, Arch - now using Arch for my laptop/desktop, Debian and Ubuntu on servers, sometimes Centos/RHEL). And I can hardly wait for distros to standardize on networkd too. Finally some long needed standardization in the basic setup of a Linux system. -- damjan