Hey Bryan,
What exactly justifies such an authoritarian "need to go though some permission process" setup? Exactly what problems are we currently seeing? I'm very sceptical about such an approach. Sure you can say things such as that I'd be nice for other people to have access. The reality is that most people don't care about most extensions and that a lot of them end up being unmaintained and very low quality to begin with. Telling volunteers they should go follow a process they do not want to follow and that they should use a code hosting service they do not want to use has its down sides. This was also not done in the past. You did not need approval to create a "certified MediaWiki extension" or something like that.
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Developer at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3