Hello guys, just to be sure here "Removals are completely up to the maintainer to decide", with expection of QA removal where the package must be already broken to get punted.
If you as developers and users find some package useful you can retake the maintainership (or became proxy-maint) which also expects you to take care of the bugs (QA can prune it even if you take the maintainership but ignore failures [even if your personal feeling is that it is corner case, it is for QA to deicde]). For dead upstream packages there are quite few problems you, who support keeping it in tree, seem not to notice. The distro patches will blob up (with each distro having different stuff) as things break with shiny new updates (and no saying it builds with older xyz does not make it work), users have no chance to report problems with the package elsewhere than to our bugzilla, etc, etc. This is the reason why the fedorahosted.org was fired up. So if you care about the package, take your time, fire up VCS/homepage/tracker there and try to work on it or find someone else interested to help you with becaming at least pseodo-upstream. Cheers Tom