[dsr_]

Short answer, because I've said it before: You can't vote on Debian issues without becoming a Debian Developer; that title requires a multistep process that takes between months and years. Debian publishes the stats at nm.debian.org, and there is general agreement that the length of the process is a problem, but not on how to solve it.

[cwyers]

I don't doubt that there's a barrier there, and it could possibly (probably?) made easier to overcome. But it still strikes me as a smaller barrier than that of having to maintain a full-fledged fork, especially one that focuses on a low-level dependency like systemd, rather than focusing on higher-level stuff like the desktop environment.