Everyone,
If I can chime in as a project lead, I think I might be able to clear some of it up. Both DAWNSci and ICE are large government-funded projects that existed outside of the Eclipse Foundation for a long time. We had our own governance models for years. DAWN has upwards of fifty current developers and ICE has upwards of 15 (not all of which are Eclipse "commiters;" some of the code is internal). Thus, it was more a "migration" to an Eclipse project than starting a new one and we just didn't expect it would be a problem to bring our people on board with minimal justification.
(Matt, I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth.)
It wasn't clear to me when we started that the PMC needed to vote on *my* committers and, as we discussed with Andrew Bennett for ICE, it seemed hilariously strange to me that you were saying "No, they have to make contributions through Bugzilla before they can commit, even if they have been funded as full-time employees on the project for years and they were omitted from the paperwork by accident." Don't get me wrong; I really like the nomination process and I am now finding it very valuable, but it was just something new that I wasn't used to nor expected.
So, pardon my long winded discussion, but I think it might make it a little clearer why both Matt and I submitted nominations for people with minimal justification. As Chris suggests, the resolution to the problem is probably a better discussion of this on the nomination form. I'm certain too that this was in the process literature that I read on the Eclipse wiki, but it could likely use some bold text or otherwise more explicit presentation.