a) Should Debian fork I.E. should a child distribution of Debian be created which is designed to support initd. I haven't heard anyone object to that. It is a weird sort of threat since the systemd people are in favor of it. That's a fine escalation. IMHO the vast majority of the anti-systemd people are system admins not developers so they don't have the right technical skills to pull off what they want long term but I see no harm and lots of benefit in them creating the bridge software over the next few years to keep this alive.
Wow that's very ad hominem.
Who are the ones that need to grok the init system ? Yes the sysadmins
not the developers unless they develop systemd.
Debian, a stable community distribution should have forked debian to test systemd. Instead of the other way around.
It's OK for the corporate distributions who have big stakes in systemd (proper service harnassing, paid developers, etc ...) to incorporate it early on.
But please don't take this big dividing stance in a community distribution by makiing it the default until systemd has proven itself and the sysadmins have had time to catch up.
It's still in its baby phase growing all sort of organs and appendices (dhcp server, ntp daemon, eating udev, ...), let the feature creep first dissipate.