Many DDs (most?) also work on other Linuxen, and are not particularly committed to "The Debian Way". My guess is that most Debian users use mainly Debian.
If users had had some representation in the systemd decision, I think it would have gone the other way. Package developers naturally don't want to have to target two init systems; I suspect a plurality of users are server admins, who would have been likely to vote down systemd.
It's hard to see how user representation could be made to work though; I don't want users to be able to tell DDs how to work. I just wish users had a bit more than zero voice.
I'm very, very confident that that would be a bad idea. I, for one, would retire as a DD if (non-DD) users were given a vote. Listening to user input can of course be really great, but as soon as I have to follow rules made by outsiders, it starts feeling way too much like work and too little like fun. I maintain mostly very unimportant packages, so what I'd do isn't that big of a deal, but I suspect this attitude would be echoed in many other DDs.
> Many DDs (most?) also work on other Linuxen, and are not particularly committed to "The Debian Way".
Really? I doubt that. Apart from some overlap with Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative anyway), I would definitely guess that it's not that many. But this is just as anecdotal as your statement, of course. I rarely see people say "in [insert distro], we usually do it like this" or the like on the mailing lists.
> If users had had some representation in the systemd decision, I think it would have gone the other way. Package developers naturally don't want to have to target two init systems; I suspect a plurality of users are server admins, who would have been likely to vote down systemd.
I refuse to get into a discussion about what "a plurality of users" might think about systemd, but you illustrate my first point really well: once we have to start doing things we ourselves don't want to do, by order of some outsider, it's no longer fun. It's work. I expect to be paid for work. And I expect outsiders to stay out of my fun.
I mean, I think it's OK that only DDs get to vote; but the Debian Project is supposed to be transparent, so I'd like to be able to find out how people voted.