The main issue with reviewing is, obviously, time. I don't know if I'm slow or if there are tools to automate parts of what I did but it took me 30 to 60 minutes to review a plugin. That's more than 1 year, doing this 9 hours a day, if you want to review the 6500+ plugins for the repository. Not counting the countless plugin upgrades of course.

(Also, don't assume that if trivial coding errors were spotted in the competition, things would be worse in the repository. It would be the same proportions I think, some contestant were obviously novice coders, some were skilled guys, just like the people who submit to the repo.)

I'm often a guy who sees the "that's not possible" part of thing, but I don't believe a validation team is possible, I mean volunteers who would check for vulnerabilities and other potential nightmares. This idea has been thrown a couple of times in the wp-hackers mailing list over the last few years, without gaining any real traction. There's just too much time needed for such a task.

Now, there might be a team of, say, accredited consultants who could be hired to review plugins and give an official badge stating that the code looks good, but who would pay for this? Who to chose for such a reviewing task? Who to sue if you install a validated plugin that eventually contains a security hole and get your blog hacked?

This said, I've had a couple request for code review since the plugin comp. I'll let the idea bounce into my mind for one or two days and maybe post something about it :)