So that really seems to be the core of the problem to me: nobody really wants to seriously maintain udev as an individual project. It's not a fun or glamorous p

So that really seems to be the core of the problem to me: nobody really wants to seriously maintain udev as an individual project. It's not a fun or glamorous project to work on, it's boring, nobody will notice it unless it breaks, and nobody really seems to care that it depends on libsystemd. For most people this is just an implementation detail. For an embedded distro I can't see why you would use udevd or eudev, you probably want a much simpler device manager without the giant hwdb.