If the developers of devuan are paying a lot of attention to the various
discussions on here about init systems, audio, getting rid of pulseaudio
and other 'pet-hates' then it slows down the implementation of
Plan A:-
get rid of systemd. Preferably all references to it such as systemd-shim
will be gone too.

If things such as vdev _have_ to become part of devuan to make that
happen then so be it.

Only when there is a proper release of devuan so that anybody who wants
to can build a working devuan server for use in a production environment
is Plan A complete.

And then all those 'wants' and 'pet-hates' and 'can XFCE be the default
desktop' become relevant and the developers can decide on their priorities.

Meanwhile, the Alpha release works, feel free to use it. I have been
using it but various XFCE irritations for normal people made me do a
full debian jessie install with systemd and all. I soooo wish I hadn't!
desktop-file-utils, thunar and other packages don't install properly but
do actually work.
At every update upgrade cycle dpkg complains about them not being
configured.
XFCE doesn't work at all.
There were the same unconfigured problems with mate, I won't install
gnome or kde so I used twm (it is a good job I am so old I can remember
when twm was about all there was!), but now my old iMac and me are
happily working with ctwm.
What fun! (But not for the normal people that have to use my computer)

DaveT