I'm opposed to this change as well, due to, imo, making it harder/less obvious/more confusing to see
where I have to pull from any given package that I want to consume as an end-user on my system,
or as a package maintainer in my buildroot.
I've however found myself having to maintain packages that I only needed as builddeps
for the packages that I really care about. So that's definitely not ideal, however:
I like the notion of a 'metadata-based' approach, where labels are added to packages
(or rather, their respective dist-git repos) that potentially fall under the 'lightly maintained' category.
These labels could be processed by the distro internally and acted upon accordingly in some way,
but I certainly don't want that maintenance status to manifest in the package being made available
in one repo or the other (and even potentially moving from one to the other between releases per
changes in their apparent quality of maintenance).
Cheers,
Christian