Forewarning
I do not have the intention by asking what I am about to ask to start a flame war nor in any way to disrespect any or all of those involved in any form with the release, maintenance and development of Devuan.

What are the future prospects for Devuan?

I came to the Linux world in search for something that offered me what I had lost in terms of OS reliability and I discovered it in Debian. Lately, with the emergence and establishment of the dreaded systemd, I've read many warning against it. I will not lie and say I fully understand the ramifications and deep changes it brings to the OS: I do not. Although very fond of computers and technology, truly dive into the reality of OS architecture would take time I do not have to spend. I understand systemd introduces deep changes that for many are a breakaway from the original guidelines for Linux, besides being in itself a vague and ill formed proposal for advancement, with too many vague and opaque areas to be considered reliable. Another offshoot of it is allegedly making the system heavier than it needs to be and breaking away with older hardware.

To my understanding, Devuan at this point aims at only purging the original Debian structure from its dependency of systemd, with further development and distancing to come in the future. I respect this. But I also understand that Devuan, because of this, is behind the Debian release cycle, because of the need to work on the present version in order to purge it. As I understand it, this is why Devuan 1.0 is tied to Debian 8, while Debian itself has already advanced to its ninth generation.

This brings me to my next thought: I'm all about stability, but being behind the release cycle of Debian, implies that the userbase of Devuan will be getting dated software (I have read that Devuan already ships the latest version of XFCE, so my last sentence may very well be garbage, but allow me to finish my train of thought). Older software offers better stability but too old becomes counter intuitive, if the intention is to attract new users, as most users tend to want modern software. Does Devuan intend to break farther away and catch up on Debian like other distros have done, by working from the stable/testing branches directly, just siphoning the software, or will this delayed release cycle persist? I've already read that even the sysvinit is on its way out, so I think I can see in this a deeper breakaway from the the Debian tree and further changes forming to the future.

But right now, besides the ideological stance (which is precious by itself) what does the average user gains by migrating from Debian to Devuan?

Thank you your attention and I sincerely hope someone will be able to shed some enlightenment on this.