FYI I've filed https://bugs.debian.org/954306 to track the potential adjustment of the Priority: field, which seems to be the majority of the discussion in this bug report.
I'm about to upload an NMU of sysvinit which drops the 'Essential: yes' from sysvinit-utils - but still keeps 'Priority: required' unchanged (and closing this bug report while doing so) for now. Regards, Andreas Henriksson
