The actual discussion came up when we talked about whether the current GR on non-DDs with upload permissions is good or bad for Debian. And we agreed that Debian lacks a lot of packages just because the poor package maintainer (tm) didn't find a sponsor in time.
Yes, that is the most difficult part. I think it would also help, if there was some official repository for unnoficial packages, so that I (as non-DD) could just upload my package to mentors (which I can now) and then just add the "deb" line (not just "deb-src") into sources.list and could easily use all packages from mentors (at least on i386). Because now everyone has it's own private repository, which I find very unfortunate. Ondrej