Indeed! Comming from Fedora, I can't really imagine the overhead maintaining two sets of init files would bring. Such a waste of already scarse maintainer resources.
It's a bit unsettling that people in the open source community need to work on this particular thing, but it's unfair to blame them for that. There are plenty of init systems other than systemd, and plenty of desktop projects other than Gnome, but most of them don't require so much downstream work. The amount of time that has to be spent by downstream projects to make systemd useful for as many people as possible, and to make Gnome available to as many users as possible, says a lot about how these projects are developed, too.
What you've described also applies to Fedora. Fedora is community run and non-commercial. The results of the latest FESCO vote shows that. It is very much a volunteer-run distribution.
Yes, many Red Hatters have a personal interest in Fedora, and many others have professional interests. But nobody (from the Fedora community leadership) is going around selling it... :-)
> It's a bit unsettling that people in the open source community need to work on this particular thing, but it's unfair to blame them for that.
I think OP's point, coming from Fedora, is that the package maintainer (of say, apache-httpd) would need to ship unit files for all init systems and support them. The latter is a large task when you never use said alternative init system, especially if a drive-by contributor gave you the initial script. (And yes, you're free to ask for help, post on mailing lists, &c. but fundamentally it'd still come down to you, as the maintainer, to fix it).
At any rate, that's likely how Fedora would behave.
Source: Red Hatter and Fedora contributor.
True, but if you insist on persuing something that the consensus is uninterested in, you can end up maintaining your own personal fork.
Whether by consesus or fiat, every project of the size and complexity of Debian needs to make choices and live with them. Here, it appears to have chosen Systemd, while, in time-honored fashion, offerering the vague prospect of an alternative to blunt the opposition.