Andrew Suffield said:
Far more likely is the possibility that they are people who should be rejected, but the DAM _knows_ that trying to do so will engender a useless debate with dozens of people chipping in with "I don't know him or anything about him but I think he should be approved because .....". How could he know this? Well, that's what happened pretty much every time so far. Much easier to ignore them until they go away; it has the same effect in the end.
No, it doesn't.Rejection may cause mailing list flames. But the current "ignore them" process discourages other people from applying in the first place. Which may make DAM happy by giving him even less work to do, but is probably bad for the Debian Project as a whole.
I wouldn't be in the least surprised if there are other people who would have applied to become Debian Developers, but didn't because the NM process appears to be opaque and filled with cryptic waiting periods.