Systemd is, above all, one of those extremely controversial subjects like politics and infant feeding methods, that people are going to have strong opinions about. It's best not to bring it up unless you are genuinely interested in a quick survey of people's opinions, as th OP has here, or maybe once in awhile as a tongue-in-cheek analogy for politics, infant feeding methods, etc.
Trisquel 8 will have systemd. That is a fact and we have all known it for some time. It took two years for Devuan Jessie to be ready enough for the "average Joe". Removing systemd is beyond the scope of the Trisquel project, which is downstream to Ubuntu Xenial Xeres which is downstream to Debian Jessie. Trisquel 7 uses upstart and is systemd-free to the best of my knowledge. It is still supported with security updates, isn't particularly buggy any more, and fits like a comfortable old shoe. There's no sense in harshing that mellow instead of enjoying this great distro and this amazing community while it lasts. If you are looking for systemd-free alternatives, there are Devuan, Free Slack (64 bit only), Guix, Void, Funtoo, Alpine, Manjaro and probably many others I am unaware of.
