First of all, I’m sorry for a late reply here. I agree that having more committers could help to improve the throughput. I’m getting some hard data on this, but I can already say that there’s a good potential for improvement.
I’d like to point out, that the nominations shouldn’t be based on the quantity of the contributions and reviews but rather their recency, depth and quality. I brought up this idea to the existing core committers and we agreed on it would be best to go through the PR reviewing mentorship first. This is nothing new, we did this with most of the recently added committers too. For some it may be just a formality, for some it make take several sessions. We are in a process of finding the mentors from the existing committers group and they will be reaching out to the folks listed here.
I believe that the mentors will open the nominations as soon as they feel the person is ready.