I'm not sure what you're expecting me to say.
I pay attention to the uploads.
I've been a Debian Developer for over 2 decades.
I was there since before all this started on the mailing lists.
I'm vaguely aware of the extent to which things depend on things.
Actually, let's try a very rough estimate on "stretch" (the new release):
for p in systemd libsystemd0 libselinux1 libc6 ; \ do apt-cache rdepends \ --no-suggests --no-conflicts --no-breaks --no-replaces $p \ | grep '^ ' | sort -u | wc -l ; \ done 34 144 133 19816
Note that libselinux1 (which is pretty much equivalent to libsystemd0 in its purpose) is almost as widely depended upon as libsystemd0, and that they are both two orders of magnitude less depended upon than libc6.
_That_ is why I reacted badly to your "forced to require" assertion.
I'll admit that there are recursive dependencies that spread that net quite a lot wider, but also those numbers include the likes of sogo where the dependency is:
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libcurl3-gnutls (>= 7.16.2), libgcc1 (>= 1:3.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.14.0), libgnustep-base1.24 (>= 1.24.7), libgnutls30 (>= 3.5.0), liblasso3 (>= 2.5.0), libmemcached11, libobjc4 (>= 4.6), libsbjson2.3, libsope1 (>= 3.2.6), init-system-helpers (>= 1.18~), tmpreaper | systemd, sogo-common (= 3.2.6-2), adduser, zip, lsb-base (>= 3.0-6)
so here systemd is depended upon only as an alternative to tmpreaper.
If you want better numbers, feel free to work them out yourself, but I'd hope that you'll manage to understand from this that there has not been a policy change to "force" packages to "require" (or as we'd call it "depend") upon systemd, or even libsystemd0.
Oh, and not that it matters, as I wasn't there when the Debian Technical Committee made its decision to choose systemd as the default, but I would have made the same decision if I had been on the committee then, and these days I am:
https://www.debian.org/intro/organization#tech-ctte
so, if that doesn't qualify me to comment on happenings in Debian in your eyes, I'm not quite sure what would.
Cheers, Phil.
Well, it least you were more civil about it. I do think that openrc or runit should have at least been on the table for a vote. Although, I am curious why you think that runit-init is no longer a package on debian. I am curious to why that package was taken down. I will stick to devuan though and you I am sure will stick to debian. That's about it.