Hi devuan,I ran across this init system the other day, and it made me think of devuan:http://depinit.sourceforge.net/

It looks like it was used for awhile by Linux-From-Scratch, discussed a bit on Gentoo lists, adored by a small number of fans, and otherwise ignored.  Perusing the docs and the (extremely small amount of) source code, it looks to be a very powerful system that adheres to the Unix philosophy while addressing the shortcomings of the current system in a backwards compatible way.
I'm not an admin, but I'd guess that its shortcoming was that it required one to rethink how to handle logging in to the system, starting up the network, and probably also shutdown.  That's probably too high a price for most distros.  But Devuan seems to be re-examining some of those subsystems anyway, so I thought I'd mention it.
Best,Jonathan