If resources were lacking to offer both regular and systemd-based init and service management, than a systemd offering should have been deferred until such time when resources become available, or different projects did some work of their own to reduce the amount of necessary resources. Offering multiple other init/service management options apparently doesn't require many resources.

(Of course, they could have saved a lot of resources by dropping GNOME until the GNOME people started being civil and not hard-depend on systemd... but I realize that's a bit of a controversial suggestion :-P )