I personally split maintainers in the distribution into three
categories.
1. Packager
2, Maintainer
3. Upstream maintainer
Nice categorization.
We differ in the view of Packagers. You consider them harmful, I consider them desired. I
am missing *lots* of packages in Fedora when compared to Debian. I would rather have lots
of extra packages, some of them broken, than no extra packages. I think you overstate the
importance of "Maintainer" class. Lots of packages maintained by a
"Packager" will work just fine, just a fraction of them will be broken (and
surely some users will appear to provide patches).
If the Packager disappears from Fedora and the project is orphaned, that's completely
OK too. Having the package for a year or two is better than not having it at all.
This does not involve core system packages, they usually have multiple Maintainers around,
or even Upstream maintainers. And for all the small projects there are out there on the
Internets, Packager class person is just fine, and much better than no person at all.