The OpenRC people in Debian only really noticed the discussion when it reached the technical committee. There was an effort to put OpenRC into contention, and all of the technical committee people who did evaluations included it in their evaluations. The problem was that OpenRC as it existed on Debian at the time was lacking. People argued that it could with a little work do the things that the technical committee people pointed out, but the counterargument was that the decision really had to be made at that point, given the argument that had built up. I do recommend reading the discussions by Russ Alberry and others about OpenRC on the technical committee mailing list back then.

Yes, everyone who has, in the succeeding 12 years, framed this as a choice between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd either didn't pay attention or is being woefully slapdash. Debian's choice was between Upstart, as established on Ubuntu at the time, and systemd, with OpenRC as a late entry.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html

Interesting tidbit:

People also made the argument that van Smoorenburg init+rc could be fixed. And in fact they did address some of it, The same year (2014), the sprawling shell scripts so characteristic of van Smoorenburg init+rc were being replaced by a new system, modelled somewhat after Mewburn rc on NetBSD and FreeBSD, where the scripts were much shorter, largely declarative, and reliant upon a new init-d-script interpreter that did all of the repetitive common stuff.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/480897/5132

* https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/sysvinit-utils/init-d-scr...