Hmmm,
I think what needs to happen is that bugtracker should, whether someone subscribes or not, is email the submitter to let them know to come back and close a bug. I don't think it works this way now.
Also we need to assign package maintainers to all the packages, and auto-assign the bugs to them. I can't imagine any reason that this would be a bad idea, unless someone wants to examine every bug and assign them manually.
I also think automatic reminders are a good idea. Something like a weekly summary of open bugs sent to the package maintainer. This probably requires the changes to notifications I suggested.
