Policy on LTS for modules (for the sake of Drupal's future...)

With this thread i want to start an discussion about modules, their lifetime and support.

Dries reported on his blog (http://www.buytaert.net/drupal-download-statistics-2008) that Drupal is growing. More people are using Drupal and more websites are build upon Drupal. And indeed, when i'm surfing i see more and more Drupal sites :-) It's a good thing ;-)

With more websites, more people are using modules. There are a lot of modules for every purpose you can imagina. Tiny and obscure modules exists. The downside is that a number of modules has a limited lifetime. This is ... life. Modules are coming and going. Even 'famous' modules like CCK started little and you never know what you get. I don't reject this 'state of affairs'.

But ... the downside is that (big) production sites don't have the security of continuity. Looking to the stats, more and more sites are rely on a continuity of modules.
For example: i'm developing a site for a church in drupal 6. The most modules i need are drupal6 ready. But over a year is Drupal 7 normal, and over 3 years Drupal 8 ... Who's gonna tell me that al my modules i use in Dr6 i also can use in Dr8? Surely, i can update them by myself. But not everyone can code php. And what have i to say to my 'customers'? "This unique feature we used past 3 years is now not longer available because the module isn't update anymore??"

For a reliable future users of Drupal need to know if they can use a module next year or over 3 years. Yes, this is indeed a policy-question: looking to a long-range plan.

Suggestion
Off course i don't have only question but also a suggestion. Desgin some kind of qualitymark, like an iso-standard. Every module can get this mark, but then it has to meet with several conditions. Like: it's stable, there's no similar module (arbitrary, i know), etc ... And when a maintainer stops developing a module, someone else from the Drupal-community has to take over this module. In this way, continuity is guaranteed. For example: a module with a LTS-mark exists in Dr6, 7, 8, 9 ... 20 ... and so on. When a user sees this mark, he knows that he makes a safe decision.

A side-effect can be that new developers not developing their own new, but duplicate, module, but connect thereselves to an existing LTS-module. For example: we have now 2 modules that are similar to each other (yes, there are differences but this is an example...): menu_per_role and node_access. Two different maintainers working of two similar projects. That's twice the effort for the same result. When only one (LTS) module exists, and one module is closed, two maintainers are working on the same project. That's more effort for a better result.

Why not give every module a LTS-mark? No, there has to be a place or stauts where a module can evolve
Why not allow only LTS-marked modules on Drupal.org? Then modules will disperse all over the internet ... keeping them together gives non-LTS-modules the chance to grow and to reach a broad public.