>they will, most likely. it's easy (as a piece of software) to be lean and clean when you're doing very little (with little error checking and recovery).

Why would you even begin to think that openrc would ever want to include a whole virtualization manager. Are you serious?

>but they are designed to work with each other.

And they are not designed to work without one another. See e.g. dbus and how hard it is to get it working on non systemd systems.

Systemd binaries aren't drop in features.