For those not familiar, Devuan is "Debian without Systemd".
When Ubuntu started shoving everything into snap I had to jump ship, I'd been using it (with XFCE) since the 14.04 days and it had served me quite well, but snap has actively Fucked Shit Up for me and just generally is the most windows feeling part of Linux I've ever encountered. One of the big reasons I jumped to Linux in the first place was to have more control over what my computer did, and snap doesn't fit that philosophy. Canonical is, as you'd expect, 100% all in on it and seeing how that went with Unity (the user interface), I expect them to keep pushing it hard for the next 5 years until they finally acquiesce and move to a more sane solution.
I had previously decided to try out the "Other Big Desktop Distro", Fedora, but found it littered with minor bugs and hassles. In that time frame, there's been a lot of happenings in the Red Hat world, and I only see things getting worse over there in the coming decade. Another thing I like about Linux is I no longer had to reinstall my OS every few years like windows really needed at the time, and even if it's for entirely different reasons, hopping distros is the same outcome. A lot of work I'd rather avoid. Unfortunately I can't predict the future and I'm usually bad at even making decent guesses, but if I wanna give less work for Future Plum I have to do my best on this.
And that's landed me on Devuan. My guess is that if Red Hat was ever going to do the shitty things to systemd that people have been talking about for years, it's going to be in the next 3-5. I don't know why, the centos/RHEL stuff makes sense because that's an actual income stream. Systemd is just some shit they write that gets used everywhere, but I can see it as potentially being an issue. And I think using something with a non systemd init-et-all will be just the right amount of learning for me. Past that, Debian testing was the only sane answer I could come up with for a distro for my daily use. I highly doubt it's going away or going sour in the next decade, it's very familiar from my years of Ubuntu use, and even on testing I feel like they put a big emphasis on "don't fuck up existing installs", which I appreciate. I don't think I'm cut out for the likes of Gentoo or Slackware yet.
That being said, I am acutely aware that around here I'm surrounded by people that are a lot deeper into Linux than I am. I'm curious for others' thoughts on all of this. A lot of this is just personal preference ultimately, but I know there's a few fluxbox veterans lurking about. I may not want to go that far, but I respect it.
EDIT: I guess to be more clear, I don't really know enough about the inner workings to have fundamental problems with how systemd operates or goes about it's business. In fact I even know how to use it, so going without it is going to suck a bit. This choice is purely based on "Well, I think it being a large component under control of Red Hat may potentially become an issue in the coming years", which again seems unlikely. But, less likely than the software I use breaking on InitV or OpenRC. Worst case scenario I decide to switch to Debian (, not forked) in 8 years give or take and get used to using systemd again.