I've simplified my earlier proposal of soft deletion and reduced its applicability to the AfD process. In a nutshell, under this policy, any non-admin would be permitted to pseudo-delete certain articles in a reversible fashion, leaving the history intact and viewable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Soft_deletion
This would make AfD more scalable, and might reduce the tensions when articles get deleted for notability reasons (because all that is required is for the affected party to produce sufficient sources in order to restore the article).
If this is adopted, I would suggest to not not allow "speedy soft deletion", as I suspect that could lead to massive overuse and conflict.