I've listened in on a number of these discussions and participated in one at WordCampNYC and my single biggest concern is the possibility of "King Making" here. If the WordPress community "blesses" particular plugins without a clear reason why they choose A over B, it's going to be a source of strife and angst in the community. Further, I think there are so many similar-but-not-quite-the-same Plugins because people have different Use Cases, priorities, and approaches. And realistically, none of those are bad things.

I think two of the criteria in this process need to be Coding Standards and some sort of Security assessment. If you know how closely a Plugin holds to the standards *and* that it has less security issues than others in the same space, the community will respond accordingly. And it gives new Plugins a chance to compete. And there's little human involvement and potential for angst.

In terms of Coding Standards, that can be entirely automated using CodeSniffer - http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/wordpress-codesniffer-standard/ Security is a bit more difficult but the concept of "security fuzzing" is well-established and there are some tools out there.

And besides, get this going and then you can go taunt other communities *cough*Drupal*cough* and ask why they're not doing the same... ;)

My 0.02.