It's time to put on the brakes

I agree on your point that talking about forks (wrt Debian) is a bit silly, and that if one would diverge a bit a blend would be the way to go.

I may be wrong, but you seem to imply that the systemd side should accommodate users who want to avoid systemd; I respectfully disagree - it's up to those users to work with upstreams (like Gnome) and packaging teams to provide patches and implement the things that are needed (alternative logind f.e.). If they did, I doubt we'd even need a blend. IMHO the question is "who should do the work", not "will the work be accepted".