Even during Debian's systemd adoption wars I'd never seen any argument calling into question Devuan as ''disreputable''. After all, it was a group of experienced Debian folks that made a systemd-less version of Debian that compares almost exactly with Debian's status and capabilities. I hope in your case you have not been forced to use Devuan.
I'd heard many times over the years that Roger Leigh was given a great deal of support by other Debian people, let alone across the Linux community. Maybe I misremembered.