/snip I've always thought that there should be a TU dashboard for the AUR. It would collect all requests in a single area with regular formatting. Nothing would ever get lost in the list and users wouldn't need to sign up to it. Each request could have it's own comments page (using the existing comments backend) for discussion if necessary. Building on this idea, the package page could include a button named "notify maintainer". This would link to a form that allows a user to send a message to the maintainer, e.g. "please add x86_64" to the PKGBUILD. If the package isn't updated in e.g. 2 weeks, the "notify maintainer" button would be replaced by a "request adoption" button. Clicking on it would send a message to the dashboard, along with the previous message sent to the maintainer (including dates etc). Any TU could then review the message, the time that it was sent, and who sent it before deciding to orphan the package, with the bonus of the package being automatically adopted by whoever requested it. Deletion requests would go directly to the dashboard. This could be a simple form with a text field for the reason, e.g. "duplicate of foo", "no longer builds", "project moved to git", etc. Of course, in the absence of a dashboard, sending formatted messages to this list automatically would work too. In that case, maybe the submitter could be automatically signed up to the list (after a confirmation prompt while submitting).
Another thing: Multiple maintainers would be realy nice... although anybody should put more thought into that, as it could easily become pretty messy. Can be nice. But a second maintainer may only be added by the first maintainer. Otherwise this can easily be abused by those impatient people. See above. In case of packages on which are working to people together who are in contact with each other regarding this package this could make it a bit easier. But in such a case only the maintainer of the package may add the second maintainer.
Maintainer groups would be really useful. Arch-Haskell would benefit from this. Currently the "arch-haskell" account is just Don and when he's busy none of the thousand+ Haskell packages can be updated. This has come up on the arch-haskell mailing list and he was working on a solution, but I haven't heard anything more about it. I have a few ideas of how that could be implemented on the backend, but it would just be another bikeshed discussion detracting from the one above. :P