Ah, what a wonderful response to this note while I was taking a bumpy ride from Baltimore to Denver on Southwest! Of them all, the calculation that Robin, with 5000 profiles, would get 7 emails a day for the rest of her life, was the most persuasive to me in seeing flaws in the original proposal!
The essence of what I was trying to get at is that yes, right now we have an "active" process regarding inactive profile managers -- active in the sense that somebody who needs a merge or to edit/link to a file less than 200 years old must actively do something to remove the roadblock that an inactive manager is, and it consumes our time right in the middle of genealogical work we're trying to do. What I'm seeking is a "passive" process where if the inactive manager doesn't respond to something generated by a computer, their profile management status stops.
It doesn't have to be 7 emails a day. Someone suggested linking this to the watchlist, which is a great idea. So maybe once a year you get one automatically generated email that says, "Hi, here is the list of 5000 profiles you manage. Please either (a) check "retain all", (b) retain me as profile manager on only those that are checked (c) or retain all EXCEPT those that I have checked, I no longer wish to manage those. If you don't respond to this email AND have not engaged in any activity on WikiTree for the last year (or six month, or three months), we will accept that as your message that you no longer wish to manage any profiles."
So my intent is not really to get active members to reduce the number of profiles you manage -- that's an individual choice within your ability to respond reasonably to merge and trusted list requests. My intent is to have some automatic process to get inactive people out of the way of active managers who find themselves stymied by an inactive manager and really don't have the time to go through the process that we currently have.
Some else has said that it's bad to have "orphaned" profiles that nobody manages. That's a good separate topic, but here the issue would be, "which is worse, an orphaned profile that anybody can claim, or a profile 'managed' by someone who hasn't been on WikiTree since 2014 and whose presence on the profile wastes time that we wish we could spend improving it?