I really don’t understand your justification here. A consequence of Sturgeon† is that most public domain material was unpopular in its day, and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022. Why does that imply copyright terms shouldn’t be shortened?
If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today.
> and only a small fraction of that is relevant to most people in 2022
How could you tell, when most of it hasn't even been seriously looked at by anyone? Good cataloging is key to making existing material more relevant to more people.
> The website was not accessible within Germany, as a result of a court order from S. Fischer Verlag regarding the works of Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin. Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany.[25] This judgment was confirmed by the Frankfurt Court of Appeal on 30 April 2019 (11 U 27/18[26]). The Frankfurt Court of Appeal has not given permission for a further appeal to the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), however, an application for permission to appeal has been filed with the Federal Court of Justice. As of 4 October 2020 that application was still pending (Federal Court of Justice I ZR 97/19). According to Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,[27] "In October 2021, the parties reached a settlement agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires. Under the terms of the settlement, the all-Germany block is no longer in place. Other terms of the settlement are confidential."
> The website has been blocked in Italy since May 2020.[28]
If anything, I argue the opposite: preservation, indexing, and curation are all possible and happening on an absolutely unimaginable scale thanks to today’s technology. You see zillions of page scans as a failure because they haven’t been perfectly curated—I view these zillions as an incredible success because now they can be curated. The single biggest retardant to a grand unified index of media is available human effort, but the next biggest is copyright that carves a decades‐wide chunk out of otherwise preservable works. Reducing copyright terms would not just make more works available to be copied; I believe it would stimulate interest in preservation and curation by easing access to works that are more relevant to average people of today.
† Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”