Don't get me wrong, I was a pretty loud critic. Right now I work on embedded ARM where most COM vendors are still - in 2015 - selling brand new kit which can barely run kernel 3.2, let alone 3.7 required for cgroups/systemd - most systemd fanatics try to tell me to compile from mainline kernel sources, which ignores the fact that these things are all one-of-a-kind once-off type systems where I'd have to port the shitty once-off BSP code which barely made it over the wall in the first place (which I have done - and took weeks on my last attempt, due to shitty quirky b0rked interrupts on the MMC interface for that board), not just "yolo, git pull && recompile dawg # to hell with re-certification and customer revalidation" that web hipsters seem to assume is the case.
But honestly, the technical committee in Debian were the ones we entrusted to make this kind of decision, so it's a meta-lesson in community participation. You can make all the RedHat conspiracies you want but at the end of the day the technical committee volunteers decided it was too much work (read: they didn't have the help like you or I around) to take on spinning a distro with the option to install without systemd.
So all I'm saying is that the Linux ecosystem is shit, but we have only ourselves to blame.
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time. -- George Carlin