If a coder has seemingly abandoned their plugin, and I've fixed it for 4.0

[Zachery]

If you want to make suggestions I would advise posting in the suggestions forums.

But to your point, what does it matter of the developer is inactive but the addon is good? For Myself and my friend we do releases under a single name, we rarely login to the account unless to release/update a mod.
Why should a mod go stale just because the author isn't around, does it mean the modification isn't usable? You're only going to confuse things. Some addons are timeless and live though upgrades (rpg stats for one...).
Authors can release the code under more or less any copyright (not GPL, its just wont work with the vB license agreement) and release it here.