It's the latter. It didn't take anywhere near 2 full years to integrate systemd into Debian, so obviously there's a far smaller number of people in Devuan work

It's the latter. It didn't take anywhere near 2 full years to integrate systemd into Debian, so obviously there's a far smaller number of people in Devuan working to undo that. The whole systemd shouting match has been dominated by anti-systemd people who are the extremely vocal majority, happy to blog incessantly about how "evil" systemd is, but apparently not that happy to contribute their time to an alternative that's more to their liking. I'm not a systemd proponent (or detractor), as I'm not a professional sysadmin and just use Mint personally, but throughout that debacle it was fairly obvious which side was the more religious and less rational, and also less willing to put their money (or time) where their mouths were. Consequently, without doing any deep research on it myself, I tend to believe the systemd proponents far more.