Have any of you gurus ever successfully *downgraded* a managed package?

I'm aware that officially, you are [not able to downgrade to earlier versions](http://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewSolution?id=000004987&language=en_US). And I appreciate many component types are one-way in nature, though there was a [component deprecation pilot](https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/q/12577/320) for a time.

That said, if you can uninstall all deployments from all orgs of a particular package version and Salesforce will revert it from `Release` to `Beta` status without too much trouble. I'm wondering if there is any anecdotal info to be had here.