That's not my recollection. Upstart was an Ubuntu project, Debian never adopted it. Red Hat picked up upstart, then Poettering managed to convince them that t

That's not my recollection. Upstart was an Ubuntu project, Debian never adopted it. Red Hat picked up upstart, then Poettering managed to convince them that they'd be better off with one they controlled. Somehow that filtered back through to Debian, and they jumped straight to systemd from sysvinit. At no point was it necessary for systemd to actually be better than upstart at being an init system. It just had to be bigger by the time it got to Debian.