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Basically, when you submit a URL your email is currently recorded.
They could keep a record of that submission(s) and if it is done in the right category and the site you are submitting is pretty worthwhile, then you get graded as a good submitter.
These people who have suggested a URL successfully could be sent an email and thanked for the URL. They could be told that they are a worthwhile submitter and would be given priority review the next time they submit.
If you submitted a URL and it was not properly done, then you wouldn't get a priortized review the next time.
This would allow people who want to get into the index an opportunity to ask / or request someone to submit their URL for them.
These people would carefully vet any submittals they do as they don't want to lose their prioritized submittal rights.
SEOers would create submittal accounts and submit very carefully as they do not want to lose their submittal access.
The fundamental issue is that in the ODP community, even staff can't even impose priorities on editors. (It's been said more than once that managing editors is like herding cats.) That is part of the attraction (for editors, at least.) And it won't change.
I understand the concept of trying to harness SEO self-interest, and it's a noble goal (a boundless source of energy, and all that). My own best attempt revolved around offering points for reporting various kinds of quality problems, and then providing editors with a list of submittals, ranked by point scores of submitter. It has several advantages over your scheme: (1) quality feedback is something that editors WANT to handle immediately, so (2) one can build a positive reputation in a short time (3) by positive actions that can be easily verified; it is (4) optional -- for editors who do not choose to participate, no submittal is de-prioritized; (5) it doesn't require individual communication with submitters; and (6) a pilot program could be implemented completely separately from dmoz.org itself.
Sorry, I think your proposition isn't a great idea.
If their submissions were reviewed they would get a score (bigger score the more senior the reviewer that accepted them) and then they could re-submit their own website again in the developed category.
Hopefully, by that time, they'll will have taken the time to read the DMOZ submission guidelines carefully and they will realize: that they need original content on their website, that they should try to be better than most of the websites in the category, that they should read the category descriptions carefully, etc etc.
By getting their training wheels on websites that they aren't responsible for, you also depersonalize the education process a bit.
As you said, an editor wouldn't be forced to use this as a filter, but after scanning through quite a few spam submitted sites or sites submitted by people who don't bother to read anything..
