Just stumbled over some removals: GnuCash removed from testing in August 2017 FreeCad removed from testing in October 2017
no sign of any effort to readd them in sight ... > Debian is meant to be a high-quality operating system, not a collection > of packages that we keep around in case they come in useful one day. Those packages above are useful today, they even mark the most advanced programs in their respective domain > If a removed package later turns out to be useful or desirable, we have > plenty of opportunities for an interested maintainer to bring it back, > and a couple of ways (archive.debian.org, snapshot.debian.org) for a > user to install it locally. The point here is "interested maintainer". I concur it would have been easy to bring them back, but it did not happen. Depleting the next stable release from highly productive packages seems not the most sensible approach to me ... jm2c Heinz