First: I hope you are correct. Indeed, it doesn't have solely to do with init, but this init change to systemd is the straw that brings everything to the fore.
There is the disregard of the users of debian (who are not just users but programmers in various free software projects), a betrayal of the founding documents. (Same sort of disregard Lennart and the Gnome team afford "their" users)
There is the edging out of "unpopular" "social misfits" "mean men", which occured from 2006 onwards.
And there is the corporate capture of debian (redhat and canonical employees on this "technical board").
Not to mention the illegal abuse of process that went on using the technical board to "bugfix" the fact that systemd was not default and only.
Remeber you "can" use something other than systemd or it's shims in new-debian. You just will have to forego the use of gimp, brasero and various other gtk toolkit based programs.
See "CHOICE!"
Free Software is about Freedom for the USER,
It is not about Developer Freedom. The standard copyright regime
is about developer freedom.
Second: We shouldn't be forced to fork because a few people decided to take over. We should FORCE those people who took over out.
Also, club or not, common law criminal fraud still applies.