Shall we fork Debian?

No. It's just that the people who want to get systemd and those do not care deeply about their init system have left and only those who see it as a threat to linux still bother.

I'm in a similar position with regard to those (or any) desktop features not being relevant for most of the systems I administer.

I'm kind of irritated about having to learn a whole set of new things. I do recognise that there are some benefits for my use case in systemd. The desktop stuff aren't the only things that systemd brings.

More than that though, is the fact that it's going to be the new default everywhere. So while you say

I don't particularly like systemd and would be happier not having to deal with the compatibility and/or conversion issues for what I perceive as minimal benefit.

I think you (and I) will actually face more work in trying to avoid systemd than convert to it. You'll be fighting against your distribution's default and the default of every bit of third party software targeted at your distro. From what I have seen most conversions are fairly painless.

So from my position that sits somewhere between "ambivalent" and "that's kind of nice", going with the flow seems the easier path.

I don't think you're wrong. I imagine all these people saying systemd is so awful are just worried that their hard-earned sysvinit knowledge will become obsolete and that new users won't have to go through silly bash scripts (that are totally secure of course - no chance of security vulnerabilities in something as ancient and wtf-free as bash). Instead they'll have something sane like this:

    [Unit]
    Description=Apache 2 HTTP Web Server
    After=network.target

    [Service]
    Type=forking
    EnvironmentFile=/etc/conf.d/apache2
    ExecStartPre=/bin/echo performing: /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start $APACHE2_OPTS
    ExecStart=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k start $APACHE2_OPTS
    ExecStop=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful-stop $APACHE2_OPTS
    ExecReload=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful $APACHE2_OPTS
    PIDFile=/var/run/apache2.pid
    StandardOutput=syslog
    StandardError=syslog
    Restart=always

    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target
    WantedBy=http-daemon.target

This is the sysvinit file for apache from debian.

    #!/bin/sh
    ### BEGIN INIT INFO
    # Provides:          apache2
    # Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
    # Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named
    # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
    # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
    # X-Interactive:     true
    # Short-Description: Start/stop apache2 web server
    ### END INIT INFO

    set -e

    SCRIPTNAME="${0##*/}"
    SCRIPTNAME="${SCRIPTNAME##[KS][0-9][0-9]}"
    if [ -n "$APACHE_CONFDIR" ] ; then
        if [ "${APACHE_CONFDIR##/etc/apache2-}" != "${APACHE_CONFDIR}" ] ; then
            DIR_SUFFIX="${APACHE_CONFDIR##/etc/apache2-}"
        else
            DIR_SUFFIX=
        fi
    elif [ "${SCRIPTNAME##apache2-}" != "$SCRIPTNAME" ] ; then
        DIR_SUFFIX="-${SCRIPTNAME##apache2-}"
        APACHE_CONFDIR=/etc/apache2$DIR_SUFFIX
    else
        DIR_SUFFIX=
        APACHE_CONFDIR=/etc/apache2
    fi
    if [ -z "$APACHE_ENVVARS" ] ; then
        APACHE_ENVVARS=$APACHE_CONFDIR/envvars
    fi
    export APACHE_CONFDIR APACHE_ENVVARS

    ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
    if [ "$APACHE_CONFDIR" != /etc/apache2 ] ; then
        ENV="$ENV APACHE_CONFDIR=$APACHE_CONFDIR"
    fi
    if [ "$APACHE_ENVVARS" != "$APACHE_CONFDIR/envvars" ] ; then
        ENV="$ENV APACHE_ENVVARS=$APACHE_ENVVARS"
    fi

And so on...

Nobody said you had to futz with it. Ideally packages would ship with the correct init scripts and things would work exactly as you expect them to, or as they did. Unlike with systemd.

Why the hell would you have a choice in kernels?

Why the hell would you have a choice in filesystems?

Why the hell would you have a choice in sound systems?

Why the hell would you have a choice in desktop environments?

I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Everyone moving to systemd seems a bit fishy. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? There might be some influence on behalf interested governmental parties giving a push to systemd. I don't have a problem with systemd its just I think it should have been an option not a default for server setups. C programs if they are not really carefully coded can be easily hacked by stack smashers, race condition inducers etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk