many sites for open source applications (freshmeat for example) give VERY CLEAR details of development progress, which in turn can give people a fair idea if the application is actually being worked on.
It's of note that not all applications when using app manager provide a "description" under details.
Making this mandatory with a changelog would be a quick and easy way for users to actually find out if an application has been sitting in the repo for months and months with no active development.

including a separate "archive" repo (as previously suggested) to move apps that have had no devel for more than 12 months would also clean things up
just my two cents.....