The core developers of systemd seem like jerks. For Lennart Poettering to stand on stage at DebConf and blab on about how init and upstart were "systematically flawed" seems quite arrogant.
For what it does, it seems good, but it was described as the "svchost.exe" of Linux which, for anyone who's tried to figure out what the hell svchost.exe on Windows is doing, would appreciate
As for the Debian fork, "just" to maintain SysVInit as the default init, seems a bit extreme, but that's the beauty of open source - do what you want!