Sorry Bastian, but your "Why don't we aim for something simple, like improving our New Maintainer process." seems a little naïve. People have tried to improve (read, mostly speed up) NM for years and I don't believe the blockers are particularly simple to solve. We want a rigourous NM process adn we're a volunteer project so it's hard to do quickly. I know some talented people who have to be sponsored which means waiting on others being available. I know I've failed them at times when my life has been busy and I've not dedicated as much time to Debian.

The DM proposal is a great way to get valuable contributions into Debian sooner without people losing interest in the project all together.

The other issue anyone considering voting against the DM proposal should bear in mind is that it's going to be easy to remove people from this keyring if you have a decent reason. I really can't see any downsides.