One of the primary reasons Debian even considered systemd, was because Redhat's control of the Gnome foundation, and thus Gnome's at the time requirement of systemd as an init, created a major conflict in terms of "do we drop gnome or not".

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.