I'm in a similar position with regard to those (or any) desktop features not being relevant for most of the systems I administer.

I'm kind of irritated about having to learn a whole set of new things. I do recognise that there are some benefits for my use case in systemd. The desktop stuff aren't the only things that systemd brings.

More than that though, is the fact that it's going to be the new default everywhere. So while you say

I don't particularly like systemd and would be happier not having to deal with the compatibility and/or conversion issues for what I perceive as minimal benefit.

I think you (and I) will actually face more work in trying to avoid systemd than convert to it. You'll be fighting against your distribution's default and the default of every bit of third party software targeted at your distro. From what I have seen most conversions are fairly painless.

So from my position that sits somewhere between "ambivalent" and "that's kind of nice", going with the flow seems the easier path.

I am almost the same as you except:

1) No desktop features are of any interest to me.

2) My position is between "that sucks" and "ambivalent"

But I do think that going with the flow is a much easier way. This isn’t a fight worth fighting if your concern is maintaining running systems. Of course it might be worth while to stay on an LTS release till the very last moment, to let all the bugs shake out.

"You'll be fighting against ... the default of every bit of third party software targeted at your distro."

Postgres and Apache? Seriously?

Probably not software like Apache and Postgres, no.

But when systemd is the default init system on almost every Linux distribution, new software will have the systemd integration written first and tested most.

The idea of a server based fork of Debian is kind of appealing in some ways, like the Fedora server and cloud projects[1][2] which are quite interesting work, aimed at a (sub)distribution with focus on particular use cases, not the kitchen sink approach.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Do...

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD?rd=Cloud_PRD

"The idea of a server based fork of Debian"

I'd be running it on my desktops. All I need is a way to spawn chromium and emacs and consoles (I like konsole, but if it drags in too many dependencies I'll put something else on).

If/When chromium depends on systemd (WTF, a web browser / page renderer logically SHOULD depend on your init system, of course) then I'll use another browser... somehow.