If I might add my opinion to the discussion, I will be very clear in saying
that even attempting to stay somewhat in sync with Debian is a waste of
valuable time and effort, and deserves a resounding “No” vote.

I'm all for using Debian upstream to minimize effort for the first releases,
but if Devuan attempts to stay in sync or close to Debian in the long term,
then Devuan will be constantly hobbled by future compromises in order to
maintain that goal. I've made no secret of the fact that I am a moderate on
the subject of systemd, but I'll be as direct as I can when I say that if
Devuan does not go its own way, completely and entirely without compromise,
it's going to “whither on the vine” under the sheer workload of spending
increasing time to trying maintain package compatibility for people who want
to jump back and forth.

I'm not saying “do not use Debian code or packages”, I'm saying cut the cord
in a psychological sense. At some point the decision is going to have to be
made whether Devuan is just another Debian. I, for one, would rather address
that immediately. Devuan is not Debian, nor will it ever be. Devuan was
created because in our eyes, the Debian process failed under its own weight.

I think we should learn from that and not repeat it. We should sync where
useful, and break where we believe it is pertinent to do so – but not waste
effort trying to be diplomatic about it. Making expectations that can't be
kept when the situation is likely to change (i.e. future versions of Debian
are most certainly going to go deeper and deeper into systemd) is an
unreasonable thing to do.

Speaking for only myself, I'd rather abandon the idea from the outset so that
Devuan is completely free to exercise its own creative imitative in the
future.