i've always been curious as to how libtool works. if you're referring to Alex Ameen, it was surprising that he was the new maintainer when he never seemed to have done anything in libtool, or any other autotools project, before he was suddenly the main (only?) maintainer.
In general, if a package is unmaintained, and someone volunteers to maintain it, they will be accepted. I gather Alex A did make the libtool release early last year, though I didn't check that myself. The general problem I've observed is that maintain...@gnu.org seems to have become more or less inactive wrt dealing with maintainers stepping down / disappearing. E.g., I told them about one such package (wdiff) and didn't get a reply, let alone any action. Well, maybe someday someone will have interest to do that stuff again. I did it for years, and I can't say it was a lot of fun. Meanwhile, more GNU packages will just become more moribund. Life goes on. All unrelated to this bug ... oh well ... -k