Competition for declarative and parallel init systems would be good, but I slightly doubt that it will stay that way. The whole conflict feels very similar to the idea of declarative and dependency based initramfs, where for a long time there was basically only initramfs-tools in debian that had it, with everyone else just using a hard coded and very long shell script. If we like to talk about init shell scripts as something people avoid to touch, its nothing compared to the dark magic and undocumented mess that went on in the initramfs shell script.

Several years ago Red Hat decided they also wanted something like initramfs-tools but which themselves had developed (a remark I recall that the developers made on the mailing list), so they built a new system called dracut that models very close to initramfs-tools, in which Debian's response seems to be: "Great, someone else want to support that complex tangle of dark magic, let's use theirs!", so instead of competition I suspect things will return to a monoculture again. A good thing is that during all this, distributions like openSUSE has also switched over to dracut which hopefully shows a trend that the age of large shell scripts in the boot process seems to be over.