Please stop the revisionist history - it is well documented[1] that Lennart Poettering himself is the one that pushed GNOME to depend strictly on systemd. This was used as leverage against Debian, and became a key reason for several of the votes for systemd in the infamous technical-committee vote.
[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/...
1) in no possible way "I'd like to propose systemd" can be seen as forcefully "pushing" something
2) please go read (or re-read) the full discussion behind the Debian tech-ctte decision[1] to understand how little the GNOME dependency mattered
2) I read debate on the Debian tech-ctte and surrounding discussion in realtime when it happened. GNOME compatibility was a key concern, and while the idea of dropping GNOME was briefly considered, concerns about supporting GNOME ended up having significant sway and a big reason - though not the only reason - why systemd won the vote.
This would normally be a purely technical decision, but in this case the GNOME->systemd dependence only exists because Lennart Poettering created it.
In any case, both GNOME and Debian willingly adopted systemd. Thinking otherwise implies that GNOME and Debian developers are silly idiots: it that's the case, why bother. If it's not the case, they know what they want and nobody forcecully "pushed" anything.
http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...
The systemd cabal (Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack,
Tom Gundersen, David Herrmann, and yours truly) ...