I'm the author of an application that I spent time a few months ago to port from gtkspell to gspell, because gspell was claimed to be a more modern replacement for gtkspell. (The app-author hat is the hat that I'm wearing as I write this, not my GNOME contributor hat.)
This request is quite upsetting to me, because I want my application to have GNOME-endorsed dependencies where I can be reasonably sure that if one maintainer loses interest, another will eventually come along and pick it up, or at least be able to make interim releases when asked. I try to avoid as much as possible dependencies that are maintained by just one person. I would feel quite burned if gspell were to move from the former category to the latter.