> Traditions are not always inherently valuable. Try new things. Discard the ones that don't work for you.
But that's the trouble. The people who make systemd keep integrating it with everything else they make and vice versa, which makes it harder to try new things because instead of things coming in pieces you might replace, it comes as one big interdependent blob.
That's their business, and their decision if they're the ones doing the work. You can always simply not use that big interdependent blob, same as ever. I'm not sure what the problem is.
I recently installed a Gentoo system with ConsoleKit and KDE Plasma, and it works great, not a trace of systemd anywhere. I also understand the original Gentoo guy forked Gentoo and made a new distribution (Funtoo) where systemd isn't a configurable option even if you want it - it just doesn't exist in that distribution at all, as far as I know. In normal Gentoo you can use OpenRC (default) or systemd.
AFAIK Gentoo also supports Gnome with just logind, too. Haven't tried out that config.
People say that if you don't like systemd then don't use it -- and that's what the people who don't like systemd want to do. But not all of them want to compile everything from source like Gentoo.
So use Devuan, you say, or some other esoteric distribution with six thousand users instead of a million. Which is presumably what they are doing.
But they still want Debian/Ubuntu to use something other than systemd by default, because you need a lot of people to use something in order to get good bug reports and get people interested in fixing those bugs and making improvements to it. Use in popular distributions is the only way for the alternative to get those things, which makes people who don't want to use systemd unhappy when the most popular distributions do.
But that's the trouble. The people who make systemd keep integrating it with everything else they make and vice versa, which makes it harder to try new things because instead of things coming in pieces you might replace, it comes as one big interdependent blob.