Last I checked, init system policy is still a hotly debated topic in the Debian community. https://wiki.debian.org/Debate... From my reading, the extremes tend toward "it makes everything easier, using anything else is a waste of everyone's time" on one end and "it's a short-sighted and wrong solution that's toxic for the community" on the other.

I don't ever recall a time when the Linux users around me would anxiously toss out their current software stack without a moment's hesitation. Did we play around a lot with new things? Sure we did, and still do! And then we move on from the things that we're not fond of while we allow the things that we are fond of to grow on us. KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell are dramatic departures from their predecessors. I don't recall a time when the developers of either claimed any different. Not that I'm terribly fond of either, but every year they each look a little more practical. Then again, I'm a Blackbox user.