Rather than dumping *even more work* on the core CentOS project (who are already clearly struggling to provide even the core distro at present), why doesn't everyone do as Dag suggested, and adopt a handful of packages and help maintain them at rpmforge for the benefit of everyone.
If everyone who has offered help in this thread, or commented that they maintain their own repos, offered to maintain a handful of packages at rpmforge then it all adds up.
good idea.