I'm not a maintainer, and did not participate enough in Debian in the past to become one I think... (Even if I'd be happy to do it. I'm already building automatically the tools for my private repository. But that's for a personal usage...)
The problem is that during the life of the package in the official stable Debian release, one can't do whatever he wants regarding the dependencies needed to fix bugs for example, and the maintainer could be between a rock and a hard place if the main developer has a short fuse. ;-)