Timing. When the Debian Hoo-Hah happened, OpenRC was one of the several systems evaluated, but a lot of the features, in the version that Debian had, that people were looking for weren't there yet, and it wasn't even packaged up as a stable Debian package. The OpenRC proponents commented that the features could be added and it could be packaged. But the features and packaging weren't there at the time.
(Indeed, ironically, the van Smoorenburg init+rc system actually added features a short while later that did away with much of the complaints about lengthy shell scripts full of mostly the same boilerplate. Similarly, it later became possible to drive something like s6 with OpenRC, to get proper supervision.)
> For openrc, this is a moving target. When I looked at it first during the start of this discussion, it was not even in experimental (and still is not in unstable), and documentation was hard to get. This has improved but still it is worse then the others. Also having a no-double-fork-setup for demons is something really useable, and I haven't seen any answer on that during time of writing this.
(Indeed, ironically, the van Smoorenburg init+rc system actually added features a short while later that did away with much of the complaints about lengthy shell scripts full of mostly the same boilerplate. Similarly, it later became possible to drive something like s6 with OpenRC, to get proper supervision.)
See https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00234.html and https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/01/msg00067.html and https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/01/msg00358.html and others. To quote Andreas Barth in 2014, months into the discussion, for starters:
> For openrc, this is a moving target. When I looked at it first during the start of this discussion, it was not even in experimental (and still is not in unstable), and documentation was hard to get. This has improved but still it is worse then the others. Also having a no-double-fork-setup for demons is something really useable, and I haven't seen any answer on that during time of writing this.