I didn't respond to Alexandre's point earlier, but wanted to now:
To the private email issues, Alexandre replied:
There are a fair number of such cases, yes. Not so much the bad patches but the corrupted/mangled/doesn't apply patches; I don't want to fill wine-devel with "this patch is corrupted please resend". And I know other people often reply in private too, for instance when someone forgot the attachment.
Hmm. I suppose you (and others) could CC the patch-daemon on any reply, which could have a similar effect. Misses objective #1 of you not having to change anything, but, in theory, keeps the basic mechanism intact.
Cheers,
Jeremy