Hi Free,
The main point of merging the two projects for me would be have a single project more active and more visible, which can possibly attract more developers (that's what is needed now by d-m).
After a merger, we could identify which multimedia packages are maintained by DD's that are members of neither team, and invite them in. These DD's may be receptive to the idea of co-maintaining packages with the new team.
Some packages haven't had an upload by their maintainer since the Etch freeze, even though new upstream versions are available. This means Debian (and Ubuntu) multimedia have been falling behind SuSE and Fedora in terms of freshness, according to the reports I'm getting from some users.
Cheers! Daniel