For whatever it's worth, I'm fully supportive of the idea of defaulting to
a simpler init system such as S6, Epoch, Runit, you-name-it. I can't speak
for anyone else, of course, but I tend to think the sort of people who are
attracted to Devuan see the virtue of simplicity. The main reason why we
disdain systemd is because it's a mass of incomprehensible spaghetti code
with dependencies up the ying-yang, and all that entails (ie a huge
potential attack surface, dependency on Red Hat's "good will" for
maintenance, etc).

The main issue with switching from sysvinit to something else is just
finding someone willing to do the work. I don't feel very qualified myself.
I'm not sure if SteveL was volunteering or suggesting we organize
something, but anyway, the idea of S6, Epoch, Runit or similar simple and
comprehensible init systems appeals to me.

cheers,
Robert