The only thing I have to say surrounding the removal of whitelists is that they actually make any form of lock against it sane and reasonable. If you were forced into 300 hours of XO to unlock CO then that would be a terrible grind seeing as there is only one XO per round (cyros not included). Good luck competing with 100+ people for XO, it's already bad with limited roles being a competition and some people will be insanely unlucky and forced to be bottom bitch even if they could play CO far better than the majority of the playerbase. I'd say we should keep the whitelists but change what they whitelist is. At the moment it's a bunch of autistic screeds that say you "can" RP properly only to go onto a server that is LRP most days of the week.
So I propose that is becomes something of an exam based around the role's mechanics, its role and the rules surrounding it. The second part of the application should just be based on behaviour, after all I don't think we need someone who's a massive wanker playing as a role like pred just because it might be a powertrip too far. Or a CO who's opening statement will most likely be "Hewwo mawines, tuday we will land on LWee and save the peepol. Bweifing at 12:20 UwU."
Enjoy hell and fury with the amount of people who may take issue to that stance in the form of staff reports. The system is better when you actually have to make a report because it will be investigated closely rather than having people standing around answering Ahelps and holding up a round. It will fuck with the round flow. I'd rather have rulings done and put ON the books so I can look back and see how consistent a ruling is, doing it in game will just lead to a bunch of unwritten rules and hidden rulings returning again. In short there will actually be less complaints in the long run and less work imo.
And sometimes you will get shafted but you take it in your stride only for an admin to intervene in a trigger happy fashion and attempt to unfuck the situation. Only to ruin the experience of the situation and fuck things up a little more with people not quite understanding what happened surrounding a certain issue.