Blacklists exists for a reason, the reason is that spam has been neglected for so long and so little has benn done by those that _should_ take action. This very group is a good example, once created to fight spam, but when very little got effected the list was renamed to anti-abuse. Today it deals mostly with whois-enhancements.
Spam is one of many problems facing Internet users and I have never heard that spam is "neglected." You just have spam as a pet peeve so you disregard all the other problems and think everyone else should too. Spam is a problem but so are people running around haphazardly blocking Internet traffic. You brought up another interesting point. This group is called anti-abuse but there is no real definition of "abuse" and even if there were this list doesn't really do anything to stop it. Maybe the name should be changed to whois standards or something like that.