Brett:
This will also make it harder to become a core developer. In the past we have been willing to give people commit privileges for showing they know how to code to our standards, make decisions when it came to PRs, and knew when they were outside of their depth (e.g. giving someone commit privileges to work on Python code but not C). We've also given commit privileges away like candy to people who have attended sprints in the past, so we have not even held up that level of requirement for all of Python's history.
I don't think that giving core dev priviledge just if you attend a sprint is a good practice :-) Maybe we did that in the past, but it seems like nowadays the process is more formalized and stricter.
Some people wrote that they are "100+" core developers. If everyone vote on each PEP, one additional core dev just has 1 vote on 101 voters. I don't see any pressure here.
Now we're being asked to also trust someone's design acumen as they will be voting on PEPs. Up until this point I didn't have to worry about whether every core dev would take the language in a direction I disagreed with because they simply didn't have the authority to; it rested with Guido. This proposed change, though, means I now have to judge all core developers not just on whether I can trust them to code appropriately but whether I think they would vote on PEPs that I agree with. That would mean I wouldn't have voted to give Pablo commit privileges because I simply do not know his contributions well enough to know if he would make decisions in a way I'm personally in favour of.
IMHO it's ok if people make mistakes on voting if we are enough voters. Making mistakes is part of the learning process.
If the vote results are public during the vote, if a voter "does a mistake", you are free to lobby to vote against this mistake to guide people to the right choice :-)
Again, I expect that the discussion before a vote will already highlight the popular opinions. The vote result shouldn't be a surprise for anyone if the discussion goes well.
Honestly, in many cases, I just follow the expert that I trust, when I'm unable to have my own opinion on a PEP.
Victor