Politics did not insert systemd into all of your widely-used distros... merit did. Even if that merit isn't what you wanted for your niche requirements.
systemd came late to the next-gen init debate and ate everyone else's lunch.
Now, the bar is high to replace init's again - meaning the next init system will need to be a leap forward instead of marginal/niche improvements.
> I’m using systemd on a thousand machines every day
You are a niche user and have niche requirements. Understand that...
Which is why the debian vote went te way it did.
This is history. Systemd was not adopted due to merit.
That's some tinfoil hat Olympics
If you want you can read the proposals, the mailing list discussions, the debates, the votes. There's nothing opaque or hidden here. If you haven't done so, then I suggest you do so, instead of disparaging someone who lived through the debates, read the list daily, and partook in the process.
How do you account for all the other distros that picked up systemd independently? Particularly the "community" distros like Arch or especially Gentoo
You mean after shipping Upstart in RHEL 6 and immediately regretting it?
> And because redhat controls gnome, gnome created a hard depend upon systemd.
This is some revisionist history right there. Red Hat contributes money to GNOME, along with a lot of other organizations. GNOME is not even close to being the only DE either... are you asserting some sort of evil conspiracy to adopt systemd for profit or something? That is absurd...
Why does it have to be an evil conspiracy? Corporations pay folks to work on these things.
Based on my personal experience: Corporations have things like OKRs and performance reviews and the like. Managers in such companies (at all levels) tend to have a hard time understanding what their people work on and whether or not it was actually important and/or useful. This leads to managers getting seduced by things that are easy to fit stories to... Bold Mission Statements and Grand Visions.
One great story is how you're "Revolutionizing Computing and Paving The Way To The Future With Cutting-Edge Technology".
Another great story is how you're "Accelerating the Desktop Through Tighter Integration With Cutting Edge Components".
Absent highly-clued-in managers who have enough slack time to figure out how useful the things you've been doing are, great stories get you more money, accolades and promotions than folks who don't have great stories. Simple as.
No conspiracy needed. It's just a bunch of folks following "incentive gradients" that don't result in optimal outcomes for the unpaid folks who work on and/or use the product.
Distribution politics is something I’m familiar with enough, and I’m well versed enough in UNIX philosophy and how bending it creates problems (which systemd has gone through, and painfully learnt it again).
Another reason that I’m not writing a wall of text is I like horses and not prefer beating them regardless of they are alive or not.
However, if it comes to that, I can roll my own distribution, which I did in a professional capacity before.
Paralel Sys-V (with dependencies), Mudur and upstart was not slower than systemd, and we were already able to do everything systemd was doing. That’s still true.
I’m using systemd on a thousand machines every day, and yes, it has improved, but it’s neither perfect, nor indispensable, yet developers prefer to lock themselves into it.
Lastly, free software moves with respect to each other, not by “moving fast and breaking things because feeling like it”. Systemd became better because they had to accept that they can’t bend everything the way they want. Systemd doesn’t live in a vacuum and doesn’t have the luxury and authority to break and build things as they wish and expect everyone adapt to them and worship them as demigods.