Well, my paid job is to work on the Anaconda installer (used by Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and other distros) as well as to maintain the Initial Setup post installation tool.

We both use Systemd and it's related functionality (such as Journal) in Anaconda (Anaconda & IS are started by Systemd units, both support logging to Journal, etc.), as well as support configuring it on the installed system (for example you can select which services should be enabled/disabled via kickstart).

We have certainly any apocalyptic scenarios, which is of course not saying Systemd is faultless - as any piece of non-trivial software there will be bugs, that need to be fixed.

We are also quite often in contact with Systemd maintainers - they seem to be pretty responsive and generally fix reported issues rather quickly. They even recently implemented an RFE that makes it possible for me to drop an impossible to maintain list of all possible console names & make Initial Setup startup much more robust.

So unless there are some specific confirmed issues preventing Systemd from being used in our environment, it seems to be a bit premature to select a distribution as a new base for Maemo just because it doesn't use Systemd.

Especially if the given distribution has a relatively small community compared to Debian, which, if the Purism Librem project is successful, might yet again be a part of mobile Linux effort.