Unfortunately many distros have already jumped on the systemd wagon but I think soon there will be a increasing collection of non-systemd alternatives which will continue to follow the KISS principle which made Unix and Linux so great. There already _are_ alternatives to systemd and systemv -- launchd and upstart (used by ChromeOS) for instance.
I hope soon we will have an init system which takes the best of all current ones while still following the KISS principle. Linux must keep this principle alive unless it will probably fall into the trap of Windows' monolithic bug hell. Ironically Linux 3.11 kernel was already called "Linux for Workgroups" :-)
It also uses libressl and the packages build against alternative libcs so that's pretty cool. It's also interesting in that it's a new distro rather than a fork.
Odd. If systemd is so Objectively Terrible (the general tenor of these posts: systemd is bad, it's obviously bad, with no redeeming features whatsoever), why is that happening? There can't possibly be a financial incentive.
Do you really want to write your job descriptions in the amazingly silly XML p-list schema?
Upstart's event model doesn't even work properly.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654
And... did you know it's using ptrace(2) to track processes?
(This assumes that Debian doesn't decide to declare Wheezy as a new LTS release once support for Squeeze ends in February 2016... AFAIK it's not clear what their plans are there.)
