In most cases the opponents are mainly opposed because of Lennart, not technical reasons, not freedom of choice, but because of Lennart. Most of them will explain their reason with refences to technical or freedom of choice but once you get down to it, its just Lennart.
You know what your average user wants? A faster booting system. In most cases that will be systemd.
You couldn't be any more wrong. The average user has no idea that she is using Linux. The number of people using a Linux system that reboots frequently enough to be noticed is zero.
Are you talking about servers? Because it's not 2000 anymore; the idea of servers running single instances of Linux for months or years at a time and rebooting is so infrequent that an extra second or two is no big deal, is obsolete. The cloud is king, and in the cloud you want to have instances which can be started up and shut down quickly and safely. That means that systemd makes just as much sense on servers as it does on desktop and mobile systems, if not more.
My cloud instances already boot up quickly and safely, thank you. I don't need a mountain of technical debt and poorly designed architecture in order to increase the speed by two seconds.
do you disagree? Because essentially every phone, television, car, printer, appliance, sign, smart watch, web server, router, and modem uses Linux.
If, charitably, you give 2% market share to desktop linux, and then multiply that by worldwide PC shipments (~80mm last quarter, so assuming ~320mm annualized), you end up with 6.4 million. Not bad. But there were 918mm smartphone shipments in 2013, of which android was around 75%-80% market share, so 688 million or so. That's over a hundred times as many users just in phones alone.
Counting embedded devices in this discussion as part of the Linux population is questionable at best. There isn't an init system debate for embedded devices. I've not seen any indication that Samsung will be changing the infra based on the init system war, any more than GE is going to change my microwave.
All of those devices are linux, and all have init systems. Currently, there are two core systems they use: bsd-like init.rc systems (and busybox variants), and sysv.
Similarly with servers: essentially all the web servers and application servers in the world are linux, and they also don't need the sort of windows-style 'architecture' that systemd brings.
In fact, I would venture to say that boot speed isn't even in the top 50 concerns of a desktop linux user.
So it's not just the tail wagging the dog; it's a nonexistent, badly drawn picture of a tail wagging several billion dogs.
You know what your average user wants? A faster booting system. In most cases that will be systemd.