If you are not already aware of it, there is discussion on debian-vote about "Debian Maintainers" - "letting people maintain specific packages in the archive without being full developers". I thought I would mention it here as non-DDs are not too likely to read d-vote, but might be greatly affected by this idea.
Thanks for letting us know. I didn't know about that and I just put my 2 cents into the debate. Ondrej