.... when the (in MHO excellent) choice to package systemd by default has already been made and it works perfectly well? I never said systemd shouldn't be packaged by default!
Apologies, poor wording on my part. That wasn't meant to imply you ever did. I understood you wanted an alternative, not a replacement. I meant more to emphasize that they only wanted one init system by default and the reasoning for denying your request just seemed clear and simple.
If something was removed from the Wiki for "no good reason", just add it back, or put systemd-free.org up as a reference and be done with it. Someone already talked about putting it back in the forums. They were turned down because of those points («no reason for 2 methods», etc.).
So, a decision was made that one method was better than the other by someone who felt confident enough to remove the other one. I would personally prefer if there was only one method listed if I was to ever attempt such a big task myself, so that's fine by me. I have no experience with either method so in the technicalities about which metod was better I will trust the person who made the call. If I knew the removed method had major advantages, I would either add the information back and make the [dis]advantages of them clearer, and perhaps include some guidance to why the reader gets to see two methods. Or, put the information somewhere else and add the link instead. This among other things (which are evident in any discussion in Arch
about OpenRC) signals a bad community.
Being told the reason for removal is that the wiki should be focused on one way to accomplish things isn't a sign of a bad community. It's a sign that people care about the wiki stays being focused on offering a clear way to accomplish something.
There were many great users that stopped using Arch because of this, it is a problem that needs to be recognized.
I don't personally know anyone else using Arch, or anyone who ever did, so I can't tell why they stopped using Arch. If they stopped using Arch because of a disagreement with the distribution maintainers' decisions, they've likely stopped for the same reason anyone else ever stopped using a distribution. The maintainers' decisions take the distribution to where it's going, more or less influenced by user opinions. If your opinions aren't matched, you leave. Nothing more to it. If there was an argument of some kind (I really have no idea since I don't care), that's between those parties. I don't anything near this kind of attitude, say, in Gentoo
mailing lists.
I have no experience with the Gentoo lists either, but I doubt this list is any different in tone as it's pretty much the same anywhere you go, online or offline. It's perhaps not not overly friendly and more to the point than some other things I follow, but I don't see any reason to read more into what anyone writes here than that.