And yet it’s been sliced and diced, features added and removed, distributions created for many devices since its inception by countless developers of varying skill level. It’s a lot more like regular Linux distros than not.

You don’t get to choose the direction Debian takes on what init or sound daemon they ship. The Debian organization does. You might be able to observe their deliberations, but your input is unlikely to be a part of it. In the end the result ends up in the repos. You can take that and change it, just like people have done with Android for many years.