At least for Debian, technical committee (elected by the community) could not choose between systemd and upstart [0], so systemd was the final winner. There was overwhelming desire that sysvinit should go.

And when this question was brought to general election, community decided it did not care: [1]

So I am not sure who those "important people" were, why do you feel they did not represent you, and what would community choose, in your opinion.

I, having worked with upstart, can say it is worse than systemd.

[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#672... [1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003#outcome