Agreed, as a developer there have been times in the past where I've pushed something to testing which - although it passed community QA - I didn't quite feel was ready to go to stable.

There should be a very clear and public discussion with the whole community about a change to having unmaintained packages in the stable repo. There may not be much practical difference, but you don't know how many N900 users use the repo (which is enabled by default, remember) but aren't following TMO or the Testing Squad list.

The council could ultimately make the decision (but not the testing squad list), but I'd like to see the rationale and discussion in public anyway so that there can be buy-in to the council's decision.

Maybe (and this is OTTOMH) the promotion requirements for an orphaned package should be much higher so that, effectively, the whole community is taking on responsibility for supporting this package (i.e. ensuring it doesn't have any critical issues; or we have a way of carrying comments through from testing to Downloads)