its refreshing to have something like this received in the spirit of its intentions

once you get devuan installed (and the installer worked fine the first time i used it in early 2015,) its as good as any derivative. i LOVE the refracta installer, i bet there are some edge cases where the devuan one even works better. i sure was disappointed by the beta version (installer misconfiguration, not bad installer) and im surprised they havent fixed it. such a small thing... reviews are very kind given that it added an hour to install time for me.
again, it worked fine in early 2015. for most cases, i prefer the refracta installer. i prefer the refracta configuration. i prefer the smaller, refracta iso download.
i still have gnuinos installed on one machine, fig os (auto-remastered from refracta, with icewm and support for puppy .pet packages as well as apt) on the others.
for alpha (or even beta) i probably had fewer issues with devuan than i did with debian jessie before it was final. or at least, they were few and all but one were tolerable (the time grub stopped working in devuan, it was solved by removing one package that was barely even related to grub. but that was before they went beta.)