A lot of the responses to the parent are things along the lines of "well it needs to be owned by a team" and all the usual valid cost-related reasons why [x] ca

A lot of the responses to the parent are things along the lines of "well it needs to be owned by a team" and all the usual valid cost-related reasons why [x] can't be maintained, and of course that doing so is boring. Isn't this the kind of project that should be reserved for people in explicit learning states such as (for example) novice hires, new hires, and aspiring mangers who haven't done any management before? It doesn't really have burning deadlines, it's not a frontline project but it's still something that can be referenced as work with impact, there's still the technical challenge of keeping it functional as the years go by, and eventually it will actually be old enough to be taken out back and deprecated. If any company could do something like this with their various projects as well as culture, I'm pretty sure Google could. Of course there are probably a bunch of problems with this idea, but it seems to be more preferable in contrast to just axing a product that a not-insignificant number of people found useful and going "NEED. NEW. SHINY. TOY. MUST MAKE MONEY NOW!"