I certainly do not blame distribution maintainers. I blame Redhat, with their not-so-subtle hints of "we might not have any resources to support anything that comes from us for non-systemd systems". Which at some point extended to GNOME and other vital sine qua nons.
> not-so-subtle hints of "we might not have any resources to support anything that comes from us for non-systemd systems".
That honestly doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If you build a tool to make things easier to maintain, you lose much of the benefit of that if you still have to support other alternatives where you have to do everything manually. (For instance, maintaining a 100-line init script in addition to a 10-line unit file.) Asking people who care about that to do the work to maintain it seems perfectly reasonable.
> Which at some point extended to GNOME and other vital sine qua nons.
There are far more people complaining about the lack of alternatives, and far fewer people willing to actually write and maintain alternatives. It doesn't help that many of the people complaining take the attitude of "you don't really need that anyway".
AFAIR the gnome people were desperately looking for someone who'd maintain console kit and the systemd people stepped up and provided a working alternative, so gnome switched. After the switch, systemd basically was a hard dependency for every system using a recent gnome version. If the time spent complaining about systemd were spent towards supporting alternatives, things might look different today. It doesn't require coding an alternative, but organizing support, funding a patreon etc. would go a long way.
It's also worth noting that you can still, today, run systemd-logind (and several other systemd components) with the compatibility layer of systemd-shim on top of another init system. But even that doesn't have enough people willing to maintain it.
RHEL5 came with one init system. RHEL6 came with another. RHEL7 comes along with yetanother init system replacement.
Each of which has required software vendors who build software to run on those platforms to do non-trivial porting work. I know it's annoying the software vendors no end.
I've heard from so many end users that they can't upgrade to RHEL7 (or derivatives) because the software they need to support doesn't work with systemd yet. Stuff that makes them frustrated with both RedHat and the software vendor. Annoying your customers hardly seems the sanest business practices.
Luckily with Debian being on board, and thus Ubuntu, at least there's some incentive for vendors to work at it.
They should be frustrated with the vendor if an upgrade is being held up by the trivial Upstart to systemd conversion for a dozen lines of code. Supporting both init systems combined is an order of magnitude less work than SysV init, and it allows you to rip out a good bit of darmonization code which tends to have details less portable across Unix variants.
It's far more likely that the real cause is one of the many major dependency updates (6 to 7 is like a half decade jump) and the systemd mention is either an excuse or axe-grinding.
