It's not systemd that's the problem, it's libsystemd0. Try removing it on Stretch. It's doable [0] but it's a pain and makes future maintenance fragile and error prone. And if I understand correctly once you do so you're not running Gnome on that system anymore...

[0] http://lkcl.net/reports/removing_systemd_from_debian/

I don't run dbus, let alone Gnome. (getting X11 to work without dbus on Debian is also a pain, though also doable.)

Which is a purely religious problem as libsystemd0 basically does nothing if systemd is not running. Debian is a binary distribution, a lot of stuff is linked against libs you probably never use, that's just how it is.

I didn't say it was being used but the Devuan project wants it out of their distro and dependencies on it are much harder to resolve than dependencies on systemd bins.

Gnome and udev have hard dependencies on systemd now, parts of KDE do too (try installing k3b for example, can't be done without systemd).

It's not as simple as you think, unless the machine is a minimal deployment, in which case it works (I've got a docker host machine that runs runit instead of systemd)

You've omitted inventing and adding pre-seed hooks to the installer, let alone improving the installer so that the user does not have to muck about with preseed hooks in the first place.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580024

On that subject, the Debian Installer has an interesting bug in the current version.

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866206 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14710986)

The people behind devuan.org had massive problems renewing their SSL certificates, taking months(!) to do so while people wrote on the mailing lists. You know, cron is hard for a self-proclaimed "veteran admin".

What makes you think they could "just" do anything in less than several years? :^)