Noone says you must run daemontools, but it is way more reliable than the evil inittab, and I doubt you could write the equivalant program in perl.
http://jongriffin.com/static/aol-supervise
Just from a security point of view I wouldn't try and inittab is a lot more evil.
I haven't seen the absolute latest doc, but I believe it shows both ways. And, it really isn't very difficult, it is like anything new. Ever tried to configure the most popular web server in the world (apache). If you can figure that out, daemontools is a breeze.