> 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.
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".