Graciously?
If you have to say you're being gracious, you're probably not.
If you're convinced something is good/better, and you've argued that way for months, do you change your mind about all that when a committee or manager decides to go the other direction anyway?
Sorry I don't read it your way, he seems to recognize that both systems would make an excellent choice:
"From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well."
If you make a big deal about being gracious, that's the opposite of gracious.
If he didn't think that Upstart was a better choice yet still argued for it, that would mean that he had been wasting all of our time.
Anyway, 'big deal about being gracious'? Your second sentence contains more instances of the word than Shuttleworth's entire missive. The title mentions grace; the text says "we ran hard, we lost, we'll go with our upstream distro on this one, thanks everyone". The article is essentially a wake for Upstart, a near-10-year project initiated and championed by Canonical, and Shuttleworth is thanking everyone for their past work and work yet to come.
Ironically, you're being very ungracious here.
From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well. I trust the new stewards of pid 1 will take that responsibility as seriously as the Upstart team has done, and be as pleasant to work with. And… onward.
Looks pretty gracious to me.
I'd guess that, given Canonical/Ubuntu has struck out on its own in various other respects (and the level of controversy that generates on forums like this one), there is a need to make clear to the broader community that they aren't doing that on this particular issue.
(Speaking as a naive desktop ubuntu user who wouldn't know systemd from upstart until they blow up in my face. Which, AFAICT, neither ever has.)
This is the little brother of "You know I am not racist, but..."
"The doomsday scenario of choosing between (a) and (b) becomes less likely if we make it clear how bad it would be. We need to provide appropriate backpressure to encourage upstream decisions that support the continued freedom of our users."
In other words, Jackson is willing to drop GNOME from Debian to pressure GNOME developers into not making dependencies on systemd.
He wants the doomsday scenario of choosing between (a) and (b) NOT to occur. By making it clear how bad it would be.
So yes, he wants to make it clear how bad it would be, but he's also the one who's pushing for making it bad. It's not like he's just warning us that someone else will make Debian choose between those two things, he's trying to make Debian choose between them.
I'd rather see the inverse: a Linux kernel with BSD userland, filesystem, and ports. But that doesn't fit with Debian's strengths as a package repository. Installing packages to different paths on different systems is not really feasible. Using ports means Debian has nothing to contribute, since it completely replaces the Debian package system.
On the other hand, swapping out just the kernel is a natural fit for their system. All they have is a hammer, so they found a nail. Unfortunately it doesn't result in a very appealing OS, since the kernel is not really the selling point of BSD. It works, but it's nothing special. The magic is in the BSD userland.
Question mark much without explaining anything?
You were too lazy to post more information or what exactly you thought was not gracious about it.