Yes, that's a real worry. Some time ago i suggested:
drivers/staging/good/
drivers/staging/bad/
drivers/staging/ugly/
good: drivers that are to go upstream in the next cycle bad: outgoing drivers being obsoleted or abandoned
ugly: incoming messy drivers with active developers
The messaging of this looks nice and the names are short and obvious.
An added benefit is that this kind of separation makes it easy for people interested in drivers/staging to follow the 'status' of drivers. Once stuff goes into 'good' a different kind of review is needed than if a driver goes into 'ugly'.
The main disadvantage would be the PR angle: putting new drivers into a path named 'ugly'. Not something you want to put into a quarterly status report, right? If we put drivers/staging/ugly/ drivers into drivers/staging/ itself, we'd solve that problem. I.e. we'd keep the current scheme, but we'd also add drivers/staging/good/ and drivers/staging/bad/ as two extra stages for incoming and outgoing drivers.