I responded to the message because I use an Emacs which converts buffers to spoken text on a daily basis and because I have written a number of speech services, so have some familiarity with the area. I've also made extensive use of both Emacspeak and speechd.el. I suspect there has been few other responses because this is not something which many people want or have thought about. There are also lots of programs out there which can turn text of various formats into speech and probably only a small number of people who would find doing so from within emacs much benefit.
I didn't reject the package. I asked what the package did that was different to existing libraries which I felt provided very similar functionality to what is being proposed. It still isn't clear to me what the proposed package would add that isn't available in (for example) speechd.el. In fact, the proposed package seems to be a subset of what is available in speechd.el, Rather than having multiple packages that do very similar things, I would rather see that effort all pulling in the same direction on a single package.
I don't agree that everything should go into GNU ELPA just because it can The thing about GNU ELPA is that all the packages in there are actively maintained and kept up to date with current version of Emacs. The mor packages in there, the more work is required to release new versions of Emacs. IMO the GNU ELPA repository is really for packages that represent core Emacs functionality. For non-core things, we have MELPA, which sounds like a better fit for this package.
Regardless, I think the better approach is to first develop and release the package in MELPA. If it becomes popular and the community believes it would be a good fit for GNU ELPA, it can be moved over to that repository.