If you read the correspondence I quoted you will see that what is being advocated is that there should be a real choice of init system. Note how quickly the original posting was answered by all concerned. It looks to me as if, thankfully, Debian is aware that the freedom of choice is being diminished. There is no hint of removing systemd or sysvinit.
As for the knee jerk reactions:-
UP2LB: If that a genuine suggestion then I thank you for it. But it's a two-fingered suggestion then you have no idea what freedom is about. You don't jump ship when freedom is attacked, you fight to restore it.
Quote from musca on 16 October 2014My point of view is: It is a modern miracle that you, clubex, have the freedom to get engaged with every aspect of open source development and that the result is still usable for me.
It is not a miracle it is/was the backbone of open source development from the very beginning. It has been worked on by people who have desired that freedom and have been consistent in their aims. By the way pointing me out as clubex in your quote can, to an English man, be viewed as preaching and treating me as inferior to you. Not nice.
IMHO and in the opinion of others systemd has it's claws in too much of the system and is intent on absorbing more and more (ie. ntp,cron etc). Even some userspace applications have their libraries as dependencies. eg.why should Gnome have a dependency on which init system is used? Is it the job of the init system to decide what user space application I can use? Of course it isn't.
Soon systemd will have embedded itself so deeply that there will be no alternative init system. So where will my/your freedom to choose which init system to use be then? Sysvinit might seem primitive but at least it didn't intrude on the province of other parts of the system.
I have been dabbling in Linux since the version 0.1 days but now I'm too old to contribute other than with bug reports. The movement for freedom in software developmnt began soon after and IMO the best thing that has ever happen to software development But when I see the freedom so earnestly fought for by countless others over many years swept away for among other such trivial reasons as faster boot times (generally for the convenience of laptop users) then I feel a great sorrow for the open source community.