I have mailed to a Debian bug on allegro4.4 describing my reasoning regarding the allegro libraries – in short, allegro4.4 is pretty much dead upstream, and my interest was basically to keep alex4 (which is cool) in Debian, but since it migrated to non-free, my interest in allegro4.4 has waned. So, if anybody would like to still see allegro4.4 in Debian, please step up now and help out. Since it is dead upstream, my reasoning is that it is better to remove it from Debian if no maintainer who wants to help steps up.
Previously Tobias Hansen has helped out, but now it is 8 (!) years since his last upload of either package. (Please don’t interpret this as judgement, I am very happy for the help he has provided and all the work he has done on the packages).
Allegro5 is another deal – still active upstream, and I have kept it up to date in Debian, and while I have held the latest upload a short while because of the time_t transition, it will come sooner or later – There I am also waiting on a final decision on this bug from upstream. Other than that allegro 5 is in a very good state, and I will keep maintaining it as long as I can. But help would of course be appreciated on allegro5 too.