At least for Debian, technical committee (elected by the community) could not choose between systemd and upstart [0], so systemd was the final winner. There was overwhelming desire that sysvinit should go.
And when this question was brought to general election, community decided it did not care: [1]
So I am not sure who those "important people" were, why do you feel they did not represent you, and what would community choose, in your opinion.
I, having worked with upstart, can say it is worse than systemd.
I have used systemd and currently am forced to use it in production. It works great until it doesnt.
There have been multiple times I have no idea what was wrong as it was faster to simply recreate the system from scratch and hope the same bug didnt happen again.
Who else has more merit to make this decision than the Debian developers (= the important people) themselves? Random neckbeards whining on online forums?
At least as far as Debian is concerned, you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd. The Devuan fork/split happened exactly because of that.
> you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd
Let me offer you an anecdote from my company. Now, we're a RHEL shop and not a Debian shop, but we've been around since long before systemd.
Most of our hosts now run RHEL 7, but we still have a handful of old boxen still running RHEL 6, and I've been personally involved with quite a few migrations from RHEL 6 to 7 during my time here. Whenever we retire a RHEL 6 host and replace it when a RHEL 7 host, the general consensus from the people who administrate it is "thank god we can now use systemd instead of having to deal with sysvinit". Every time I have to do anything on one of our remaining RHEL 6 hosts, I brace myself for pain, because our RHEL 7 hosts are just that much easier to manage.
