Upstart seems like an odd example to give, given that it was the first sysvinit alternative that actually made it into major distributions. RHEL 6 (thus CentOS 6), ChromeOS and some of the earlier Fedora versions make use of it. This was after an attempt to port launchd failed, because of licensing issues. systemd came several years later.
Red Hat is a different business model. Their venturing into the cloud is more recent. Historically, they've been more into the support business, and this necessitated having a lot of people fix bugs in the Linux ecosystem. That and their acquisition of Cygnus Solutions means they're the de facto gatekeepers of the Linux kernel and much of userspace.
Canonical is a more Apple-like company. They care about being internally consistent and formulating their own brand, interacting with the outside only where necessary.
Well I'm aware it made it into CentOS but that was kind of short lived and was never updated to newer releases of the codebase (thus making it kind of a init system floating around in limbo with compatibility issues.. many of which I've personally encountered). I understand what you're saying about RedHat vs Canonical, but tooling that is as critical as a containerization or init system don't work very well (IMHO) in a vacuum. You have to have it more widely available, useable and used by the community or not only can you not build community, but you end up creating a fractured ecosystem that makes it hard to tool for among other things.
Interestingly, upstart's first release was the same month that launchd's license problem went away. If Apple had been a little more responsive to the community, upstart may have never taken off.
Red Hat is a different business model. Their venturing into the cloud is more recent. Historically, they've been more into the support business, and this necessitated having a lot of people fix bugs in the Linux ecosystem. That and their acquisition of Cygnus Solutions means they're the de facto gatekeepers of the Linux kernel and much of userspace.
Canonical is a more Apple-like company. They care about being internally consistent and formulating their own brand, interacting with the outside only where necessary.