To the point, the rest of the discussion here revolves around init scripts and the filesystem hierarchy, which are the only parts of LSB that anyone actually us

To the point, the rest of the discussion here revolves around init scripts and the filesystem hierarchy, which are the only parts of LSB that anyone actually used. (And they're sticking around in Debian, at least for now.) In theory LSB meant a vendor could ship an RPM that would work flawlessly on any Linux distro supporting that LSB release (which on Debian meant supporting RPM alongside DEB as a package format). In practice vendors would just target RHEL and/or Ubuntu and call it a day.