Hm... two steppers geared down quite a bit, a hard drive head. Striping between platters really is a problem, but given enough time...
That would be an interesting challenge, now to find someone to pay for it.
I don't think it would be easy, but if the information is still on the platters you should be able to recover at least some of it.
Especially if it is email or other textual information it would not take a very large fragment to contain a large chunk of text.
On a single platter drive you'd have a better chance than on a multi-platter one, the synchronization tracks would help in figuring out what went were. It's a bit like puzzling together shredded documents.
But I think that's mostly just overkill. I'm fairly sure that it is completely infeasible to recover data even for the mighty government. :P
I suspect the theory is that wiping a drive is prone to accidental failure/mistakes. Destruction is pretty unequivocally permanent :)