hi,
1) it should work - in fact I was running my test sites with missing mods for several months already, I think the 2.0 is a good place to make sure it works as expected, at least we will have more reports 
2) I do not like it either, I hope this will motivate somebody to finally do something about this. well the assignment mod needs rewrite itself, I hope we stop adding stuff there and finally fix it
Yes, I'm happy to move all those four modules to contrib AS LONG AS we keep the tables in the database and are able to recover all the activities later if necessary (eg when you install the module from contrib it keeps using the same tables or runs an upgrade script).
Hopefully this does spark some renewed interest in those modules.