Sorry, just throwing in my 2ct, not even knowing how to correctly quote
(I receive the digested list).

Imho the biggest chance, the biggest potential for devuan would be to
just start off as "another" debian, just without systemd and, and I've
read about it on this list, with maybe vdev as a replacement for udev.
To discuss nano vs vim as default is pretty much besides the point (as a
vim user I'd still say nano is a good default because it pretty much
explains itself in the bottom bar).
I've been trying several Linux/BSD over the last few years and felt
pretty uncomfortable with not being able to kill some systemd services
on fedora, so that's where my n00bish scepticism set in. I consider
myself very much a plain "user" without much understanding, but I feel
that I'm not the only one who has so far adopted Debian as the most
common distro and gotten acquainted with it. I also feel many users feel
uncomfortable with the whole systemd cluster and would eagerly switch to
an "oldschool" Debian which they got to know how to handle.
Uh, this is just a little "rant", but I really look forward to see
Devuan released. For the moment I've switched to gentoo, which I fell
might even suit me more than Debian, now that I've invested some hours
to grok. Nonetheless I guess I'd go back to a stable systemd-udev-free
Devuan if there was one.
I'm esepcially excited about the vdev development and kudos to the guy
who's doing it.

Summary: what I wanna say is that "systemd and udev free Debian" would
imho be the thing to be really successful so even for the people working
in their free time there is quite some potential for this distro to
immediately go popular and successful, if everything else remains
debian-ish.

Cheers

stephan