Andrew’s the steward of the electronics lab, so his opinion carries a lot of weight. It was a shambles when he started, and he’s put a lot of work in.
If you disagree, the board will entertain proposals.
Unlike Andrew, I am on the board, so I can say officially that Asmbly’s not running a scrapyard. We don’t accept donations of broken equipment. If you want to use the shop to fix something and donate it when you’re done, that’s great.
As far as tools go, I’m inclined (as I think Andrew is) to keep anything that actually works, regardless of age, so long as we have space for it.
Parts inventory is a tricky thing. In theory, I like the idea of having a full assortment of discretes at hand to enable tinkering. In practice, Andrew’s absolutely correct that (in a nutshell) entropy is a bitch. A well-maintained and curated inventory takes a lot of effort, and an unmaintained inventory becomes a junk pile if you turn your back on it. Before you know it, people are dropping off busted inkjets because somebody might use the motors.
I also agree with him that it’d be nice to have a good working classroom-type set of something to experiment and prototype with (maybe an Arduino variant) but not until there’s an instructor signed up to do regular classes with them. The board would very much like to see more classes in electronics and more users of the electronics lab.