[akanevsky]

Since seemingly many of you here cannot read past the first post - I'd like ya'll to read it again.
I edited it to describe the NEW way the QA team would work.

This isn't a highschool playground

Oh. And how come you acting like you are on one?

You are treating it as if it is or should be...

You are right. It should be. Because amond PHP developers, Jelsoft's code is the best.

1. Badly written code
AND
2. Well-written code that looks bad
In case 1, the code is badly written so that there are more queries, it is inefficient etc.
In case 2, the code works well, but just looks bad - ie. it's not formatted nicely in separate lines with comments.

I was actually talking about both. To help remove any excess queries or inefficiency plus help format the code the best way possible.

Teaching him how to do it right is altogether different than chastising him in public with some sort of label. That will turn some otherwise good coders off from trying to learn and make it better.

Not teaching. Helping with suggestions...
People learn HTML. It is not cross-browser compatible in some ways, so it makes a lot more problems than pure formatting. Yet there you are - people learn both HTML and XHTML.

i would never expect to pass QA or any other standard

You would not need to pass. Your hack will be published the same way as the ones marked by QA...

Instead of "This hack is not quality assured and therefore is garbage"

Again, the hacks that have not been perfected, will not be marked as "garbage" in any way...
If they are, then you must agree that when there is a HOTM, all the rest of the hacks is marked as garbage.

Bottom line - nobody would "approve" or not "approve" anything. Just once a code of some hack has been perfected in ITS STRUCTURE, it would be marked as being so.

about personal preferences..

There is such thing as common sense. And there are a few ways that when being followed make the code easier to read, edit and understand for the majority (except for the masochists).