Upstart's CLA definitely had an impact (Ubuntu even shipped an additional patch in the Ubuntu Upstart source package, because the author hadn't signed the CLA, so it couldn't be incorporated into the upstream), but Upstart had a pretty fundamental design flaw - the dependency model was entirely broken (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/44765...), and Scott James Remnant left Canonical in early 2011 before rewriting it. Canonical never really funded anyone in a position to fix this kind of thing, which didn't really give a positive feeling about long term technical maintenance.