Dear Stephen,
The history has been explained by others. I've been working for a while on dropping at least gcc-mingw32; see #644769 which tracks the various packages build-depending on gcc-mingw32 and/or mingw32. There are only three packages left now; see #623400, #623402 and #623526. Patches are available for all the bugs so NMUs should be straightforward if they're deemed necessary - I could do the NMUs but I'd need a sponsor!
thank you very much for taking care of this. It's good to know that you have already taken measures to drop the obsolete packages. How about mingw32 (the one without gcc-) and friends?
mingw-w64-i386 and mingw-w64-x64 are a bit ugly but still look sensible
True, but mingw-w64-i686 and mingw-w64-x86_64 would even somehow match the compilers' GNU tuples.
- Fabian