It leads to better software, faster.

Going back to the original point of this thread--we should do it because it was what was proposed and, i gather, agreed upon at the IRC meeting. In any case, the examples you gave are a good example of how the present system doesn't work, not that it does. There should not have been 10 thumbs up if there were blockers. I would venture to guess that the 10 thumbs up were popularity votes and not from the "testers group" that i advocated we adopt.

Anyway, my interest in this is that when an update for an app is ready, especially a trivial update, and it improves upon the current Extras version, making it go through the same level of scrutiny as the original version is a waste of time and discourages thorough testing in the cases where it really is called for. In other words, it leads to people being careless and cavalier in testing and missing blockers.

I would even go so far as to say that requiring 10 tests may be less secure than requiring 5, for the threefold reason that the tester is more likely to be complacent when there are 9 others to pick up the slack, there are more tests to get done, and because the dev is more likely to get fed up with the process and recruit the "testers" in less than helpful ways (which seems to be a fairly common practice). I have resisted telling people to "try and and thumb up" because i believe in following the mandated procedure, but i don't happen to believe that this one is very effective.

I'd be fine with just reducing the karma and quarantine to 50% in the case of an app already in Extras. 5 days and 5 tests is more than enough, especially if the dev and the testers are both coming into it as a positive thing (a chance to scare out bugs) and not an onerous and unrealistic burden. Five or even one real test is immensely better than ten cursory tests.