I think there is value in maintaining both branches (old and newcore) as separate source and binary packages, but if maintainer resources are truly the limiting factor, I suggest moving completely to newcore.
Is the Debian packaging maintained in a VCS? I'll be pushing and tagging patches for a couple of the outstanding bugs in BTS. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org