De-structing Your List (or) Growing Your List in Reverse

I know everyone says "The money is in your list." To a degree this is true, not totally in my experience, but somewhat. My list is starting to get fairly big. (10K+) As most people know, once it gets over 10K on Aweber, you need to make it pay, or it's a drain on your bottom line. Email marketing isn't what it used to be. I've never seen response (sales) rates that the Gurus claim from my niche. (Not IM)

My email strategy has been to have excellent (original) info on the sign up, then send out (top quality) free info on follow-up emails. (4 follow up emails every 7 days...it was 8 follow up, but people were opting out and complaints of too many emails) Then send out email blasts every couple of months promoting a sale of my material.

Here's the thing; Lately I've been "culling" my email lists. I go through it, starting at the beginning or earliest, and if they aren't opening or clicking on anything in 2 years, I erase them. If they just downloaded my (valuable and one-of-a-kind) free material, and nothing else, I figure they'll never buy anyway. Erase them.

My principle reason being, if they aren't even bothering to "open" (let alone "clicking") the emails after 2 years, most have it on "junk email" settings anyway, or no longer have any interest.

As you can imagine, this is a lot of work. But I would rather have an interested, responsive list, rather than a "big" list.

My question to the successful email marketers out there: Should I even bother? Good strategy or bad?

Thanks in advance for paying it forward.