The thing is, this has been tried directly on VFD before, and failed, because people (usually inclusionists) bitch about the early removal of debates/pages. Perhaps what is called for is an amendment to deletion policy. Heck, I don't know.
The best work I've seen was made by Erik Möller. Essentially, deletion first passes through a consensus stage where reasons are given and if any reason is left unanswered the page is deleted. If there are objections answering all the reasons for deletion then it is deleted. Then, only if it doesn't pass there does it move to VfD where 80% vote is needed to delete.
I opposed the proposal, mainly because the reasons for deletion didn't need to be agreed upon in advance, so someone could list a bogus reason "Delete because it is a US President" and no one could effectively counter the reason. But I think it could be worked on, and had a large majority support.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_requests
Anthony