It would be futile to decide not to use systemd long term if no efforts existed (either from us or from upstream) to develop and maintain proper alternatives... and I don't mean just the init system here, but the whole range of services systemd might obsolete (upower, consolekit..etc).
I talked a lot with the guys who are splitting from Debian but there is no plan for us to switch base. There is no plan either to go against Debian's decision to use systemd. Right now in 2014 our only concern is to "choose" what to use for the 2+ years coming. Next cycle around, say in 2016, if we haven't done so already we'll likely align ourselves with upstream.
Of course, if the way upstream develops makes it impossible for us to ahieve our goals or to meet our own expectations, we'll get involved in the development (whether that means patching, forking, replacing with alternatives or writing our own). If and when that happens, we'll need to assess risks, costs, and goals. Talking about this is premature though. Right now systemd works pretty well, and the only issue on the horizon is that we're as stubborn as its development team when it comes to getting what we want (and it definitely looks like our priorities and philosophies differ)

On the matter at hand, we're only concerned (for now) about whether or not to use systemd in Betsy. At the heart of this there's power and session management in MDM, Cinnamon and MATE, and maintenance on top of Jessie. From a development point of view we're excited at the thought of jumping onto Systemd. From a maintainer point of view, I'm still afraid it's relatively new so I want to make sure everything works well before we consider using it.
One thing I didn't speak about also.. but that's premature as well... is the fact that systemd support in Cinnamon is activated at compiling time. I'm hoping we can solve this in 2.6 so that whatever choice we go for, people can decide otherwise for themselves and not have to recompile their DE to make things work.