Formation of a "Core" team for vital system components

The problem

The base system does not only form the general foundation for any installation; some of its components are critical, in the sense that any of their bugs affect numerous other packages, or they are security-relevant (SUID binaries, or daemons running at root).

Consequently, bugs and security issues are frequently important or serious.

Actual situation

Some of these critical components are either unmaintained or under-maintained. For example, cron is a daemon that is installed basically everywhere, runs as root and executes user-submitted jobs, and has both broken user systems and has been exploited before, but nobody wants to adopt it.

Expected situation

Debian should ensure that components of the base system, and possibly also other packages with high popcon, receive adequate maintenance. A "Core" team might be able to address that. If such a team cannot be formed voluntarily for lack of resources, funding for such a team should be considered.