Hi Justin -
One of the primary goals is to come up with a system "trusted" enough so that anyone can use those reviews and tests in place of their own. The organizations that originated this did it for exactly the reason you stated; so that they would not have to spend extra resources approving plugins.
To achieve that, we need to come up with open, visible, trusted processes and results. If we succeed, then anyone can use them and trust them.
As far as giving developers the heads up, again, we're trying to be as open as we can. We would like the automated tests to be as complete as they can be, and then made available for developers to test on their own, before submitting their work to the database. That way, they can get their work in the state they want it before hand. But once something is being distributed to the community, it is important that the distribution has open, visible tests and reviews.
We do want to be able to send those results to the developer, and down the road, even offer to provide fixes.
Hope this helps.
mike