Quoting Rob Owens (robowens13@???):

> I would have to say no. I was on debian-user, and saw no poll. There was
> a lot of discussion, and the anti-systemd folks were largely ignored or
> told "go away, you're bothering us". I subscribed to debian-devel to
> monitor and discuss the situation, but my impression there was that the
> opinions of non-developers were largely ignored.

It would be pretty much normal and expected for the Debian Project. It
has always made it pretty obvious that it's a community of developers
who run it to serve their own perceived needs. And that's pretty much
inevitable, given its parliamentary structure and governance mechanisms.

I would not have expected them to pay a lot of attention to _my_
opinions, for example. I'm on debian-devel, debian-security, and (I
just remembered) debian-legal; I rarely speak on any of them, and don't
expect what I say to have _political_ influence, but occasionally I have
influence because what I say has resonated with the perceived best
interests of the project's developers, i.e., I'm understood to be
speaking as a member of the surrounding open source community, and I get
listened to if I say something that makes sense for _them_, the
developers.

Thus, I'm rather surprised that some members (and ejected ex-members, like
Steve Litt) of debian-users seriously expected protracted lobbying by
them as non-members of the project was any sort of pragmatic plan.
(I don't mean you personally; see below.) I mean, I'm not trying to put
salt in wounds, here -- and obiously some folks are still sore about
that -- but the utter, total predictable-in-advance futility of trying
to batter down the political direction of Debian Project as outsiders
posting advocacy screeds to debian-user strikes me as pretty obvious.

Thus, I'm still a quizzical over the question about whether there was a
poll of Debian _users_. (Except that it was based on someone's
overreading of a blog post by some nobody-in-particular commenter, so
there's that.)

> There were a couple people who I heard arguing for systemd because of some
> particular useful feature. But most of the arguments that I heard from
> developers in favor of systemd was that it would be too hard not to adopt
> systemd as default.

The metaphor of 'too big to fail' comes readily to mind, doesn't it?
Lock-in. Exactly where one (IMO, as also your opinion) would want to
say 'Gosh, this sounds like an excellent reason to _not_ adopt it.'

> We all know that systemd's plan all along has been to make resistance
> futile, so I won't get into that. But when somebody tries to tie my hands,
> I try to stop it. Unfortunately most of the Debian developers (at least
> the vocal ones) did not share my view.

Let's try to see this in perspective, shall we? This group _here_ has
strong views on init systems. Your bog-standard specimen among the
~1,000 Debian developers almost certainly knows almost nothing about
init systems -- even now, but especially then -- pretty much the same as
your bog-standard Linux user.

I'd guess that those who 'didn't share your view' saw the entire thing
as just a nuisance that had little or nothing to do with the packages
they maintained, that involved fighting over an obscure bit of system
plumbing that they had little understanding of or concern over, and they
mostly just powerfully resented having their time consumed over
bickering.

Hit frazzled developers with a couple of years of mostly stupid and
often childish fighting, where all substantive information was buried in
a thick cloud of angry advocacy noise, and they have a tendency to get
peevish and just take the easiest and shortest available path to make
the whole matter go away. Which is what happened, to make a long story
short.

I don't know why anyone is _surprised_. Disappointment (what _you_ said)
is fine, annoyance is justified, but surprise seems to evince
startlingly little understanding of how political groups of technical
individuals tends to function -- especially when spoken by a political
group of technical individuals.

Present company (you) emphatically excepted, as you said just
'disheartening', rather than shocking/surprising. It was and is (IMO)
indeed that.