While it's true that I'm a dyed in the wool illumos person, being in the core team and so on, I have Linux desktops, and the occasional Linux system in lab environments. I have been supporting customers with all sorts of environments that I don't get to choose for most of my career, including Linux and Windows systems. At Joyent most of our customers were running hardware virtualised Linux and Windows guests, so it's not like I haven't had a fair amount of exposure. I've even spent several days getting SCO OpenServer to run under our KVM, for a customer, because I apparently make bad life choices!
As for not discussing the social and political stuff in any depth, I felt at the time (and still do today) that so much ink had been split by all manner of folks talking about LKML or systemd project behaviour over the last decade that it was probably a distraction to do anything other than mention it in passing. As I believe I said in the podcast we did about this RFD recently: I'm not sure if this decision would be right for anybody else or not, but I believe it was and is right for us. I'm not trying to sell you, or anybody else, on making the same calls. This is just how we made our decision.