What about the idea of requiring new Experimental documents to include text that indicates when the experiment is to be considered completed absent new work on it? Essentially, the document declares a date by which the experiment is considered concluded, and code points automatically deprecated, and the document itself goes to Historic status, unless some other document action updates the deadline or moves the work to the Standards Track. Keeping track of such dates to trigger these actions by default becomes a new burden for the Secretariat, I imagine. I don't know what that cost would be compared to the "cost" of experiments currently languishing in this unresolved state. To Eliot's point, work that is resumed much later could always restore document and code point status and declare new drop-dead dates when it becomes interesting again. -MSK