Hi,
Currently on Commons, the access to the GWT is limited to a small group of "happy fews" (who have the GWT permission).
Becoming a part of this group seems to be difficult, even for prominent players of our community: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bureaucrats%27_noticeboard#GWTool...
To my opinion, we have nothing to loose (and maybe a lot to win) by opening the GWT to all Commons users. This is the way we use to work and what makes us successful. I don't see why we should proceed differently here.
AFAIK, the only risk of this move would be to be flooded by inadequate files. That's why we should maybe limit the number of parallel GWT downloads to 1 or limit the overall number of uploads to 10 per XML file for non-GWT permitted users. An other solution would be to adapt current admin tools to allow them to efficiently deal with this new kind of challenges.
Do you see any other risk?
Regards Emmanuel