What's the next step? Technical help will certainly be needed.
There's a proposal on the pump to "allow non-sysops to view deleted pages". Angela opposes it. I think a slightly better solution is to allow a certain class of users to view the pages. This wouldn't be too hard to implement, just add a third category to the restrictions column.
But perhaps an even easier technical solution is to just modify Special:Export to allow certain IP addresses to access deleted articles. I'm sure we can come up with something that no one objects to, unless there's an objection to me personally having access to deleted articles.
Just to clarify: Only material deleted via the VfD process.
Personally I'm more interested in the speedy deletions, now that these are increasingly being used to deal with legitimate content. Most of the VfDed material shows up in one of the approximately weekly database dumps. I've got a script to parse those dumps, but they almost never contain speedy deletions.