Mhh.. what about (auto-)committing to a D7.x-next branch after two independent people have confirmed a patch as working? That would give the process of reviewing patches more resoluteness, also liberating the core CVS admins to decide what gets in and what not. Patches that don't proof as a problem in 7.x-next could then be cherry-picked to 7.x-dev...
No-one runs 7.x, it's fairly unstable and isn't supported for either upgrades or security releases - and that's the case right up until release candidate, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. While commits are a bottleneck at the moment. Reviews are a bottleneck /all the time/. Nat PS. 10/1 odds on that more people reply to this thread than review patches over the next couple of days. I'd love to be wrong of course.