Thanks for your thoughts on it. I am thinking it might make sense to turn PRs off for elm-janitor packages - to encourage the PR to be made against the official version first? Not sure if GitHub lets me turn off PRs without also turning off Issues though, I should check that.
Not quite complete yet, but I have been trying to document a process (and FAQ type stuff) here:
https://github.com/elm-janitor/manifesto/blob/master/README.md
https://github.com/elm-janitor/manifesto/blob/master/git-help.md