Crikey; filing an NMU without any particular notice is not the act of someone trying to keep the peace. I'm no expert in Debian policy but surely the good form approach is to submit the patch to the bug report and give the maintainer a week to think about it.
I'd love to see SysV init support continued, but that NMU request isn't helping. Maybe try harder with the negotiating first. There could be context outside the bug report, but hostile maintenance is not the path to take. 4 people complaining in a bug report is no quorum for overruling the package maintainer either.
If you read the bug report there is a period of about 7 weeks where they are asking the maintainer why it was removed, offering to fix it, pointing out that it works fine and can just be put back etc. with no response whatsoever. I don't think there was any further negotiation that could have elicited a response.
The NMU was also delayed by 14 days in order to give the maintainer time to respond. Which they did. Within 3 hours, to simply say "please cancel [this NMU]."
Don't get me wrong: I use systemd and have no interest in going back to sysvinit, but to say the sysvinit users didn't try hard enough to negotiate here seems rather unfair.
On the other hand, the maintainer ignored the discussion until the NMU was submitted, so it at least had this merit (although, still not useful, since the maintainer is still discarding the issue and refusing to explain his choices).
Lets get some perspective here. This change actively and intentionally broke working systems. Let that sink in before considering the severity of the problem and the appropriateness of the actions.
I'd love to see SysV init support continued, but that NMU request isn't helping. Maybe try harder with the negotiating first. There could be context outside the bug report, but hostile maintenance is not the path to take. 4 people complaining in a bug report is no quorum for overruling the package maintainer either.