I wrote this, and somehow managed to forget Quake Live. Epic fail.
Seriously? If you're not playing, we're going to delete your character if you haven't put over 2 hours of work into it? This isn't blackmail, it's common sense.
This is the equivalent of deleting all chars under level 10 for WoW. Makes no difference to anybody actually interested in playing, other than making the service faster and of better quality.
Truth be told, as long as you get the "synthesis" end option, the rest doesn't really matter too much.