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I find this "wait and see" approach quite interesting. It might bear research however on how many of the speedy deleted articles are really "bad" articles (vandalism, pranks, etc.) vs how many speedy deleted articles are actually 'articles with potential'. One of the problems I can see with "waiting" to see if an article will improve is that it might soon creat backlogs, I can already see a humongous category of "articles that might someday become Articles, because they just accumulate in some corner of the wiki. Recent Changes patrolling, with whatever tools it is today being done, is a good way to monitor new articles and act upon bad content. I am not sure if people speedy delete by monitoring recent changes, so let's say it's an assumption. If that is the case, it might be of interest to look at some other kind of "recent changes stuff"(something dynamic, rather than static like a category or a special page) where articles that have not been touched/improved in X days pop up again for active patrollers to look at. The thing would go something like this:

• a not-so-good-but-might-have-potential-because-we-don't-know-yet article is created.
• RC patrolling would tag it as "review in X days".We could think of a set of loose criteria that would make an article be tagged "review in X days" rather than a speedy delete (number of edits already made by that editor, lack of vandalims warnings etc.)
• The article would then pop up again in Recent changes (or something equivalent) after the X number of days to see if anything has been added, changed, improved. And maybe a gain after a Y number of days.
• Then deletion may take place if the article has not been substantiated.

The idea would be to decrease the number of bites of newbies, while still keeping the important part of RC patrolling, which is the "dynamic" part of it and try and avoid the "out of sight, out of mind" effect which I suppose might be a big part of speedy deletes that might be too quick. Just playing with ideas here, not sure of the technical implications, that kind of stuff. But trying to address that "incubation" period that people seem to need to get on track.