I'm not convinced by that at all!
If they are to be anonymous, who chooses them?
by what criteria are they chosen ?
who decides which users are 'respected'?
who must they be respected by?
Whats going to stop anonymous persons form exercising petty personal grudges and agendas? Its even more difficult to hold them to account if we don't know who they are!
The majority of community mods are likely to include some unlicenced IP. If they are to be officially sanctioned (by association), how will this be prevented?
Do the panel have to refuse every mod that has unlicenced IP?
If the mod provider states they have a licence, who is going to pay for lawyers to check the legality?
Do you expect the devs to trust anonymous 'respected' volunteers possibly with no legal expertise with their livelyhood?
What if some unlicenced IP slips through because one of the volunteer 'respected' persons messes up - who is going to pay the damages after the lawsuit?
If you don't have a panel and do things in a similar way to youtube , having no selection process, instead using user ratings and content reporting mechanisms, you can sidestep all those issues. Additionally we might get some un-licenced 'real' content that doesn't get locked because the IP owner doesn't see any advantage in preventing its use. Sure some mods using unlicenced content will be removed, but many will not, and doing things this way, the devs are not in such a legally vulnerable position.
How many of the custom 'user' skins in the database have corporate IP all over them and yet have no permission? yep, plenty of them, and yet in practice, there have been no issues. If those skins were officially sanctioned, you can bet that there would be major legal problems. There is nothing significantly different in the case of mods - at least from a legal standpoint - other than that the unlicenced content wouldn't even be stored on official servers.