Sounds a lot like the old system we had, except with payments.
When the mod uploader was made it was moderated; anyone could upload a mod but someone from the upper staff or mod team had to approve them in order for the mod to be playable online. The obvious advantage was that it would keep crap mods under control, and since mod team were supposed to keep on top of it we wouldn't have to intervene with it.
However there's problems with it. Obviously to test a mod online it needed to get through the system, mod team died & it was left on admins to approve them - which generally involved getting a PM telling us to with a load of abuse following 10 minutes later because it hadn't been done instantly.
So in the end it was set to auto approve everything, leaving us with the ability to remove mods from the list. As for mod team, there are a few of the better mod makers with the perms for it so they can clean up their test versions themselves.
However there's also a few issues with the uploader & mod manager in general - for example deleting a mod from it doesn't kill the mod file completely, so once it's uploaded it's stuck on the server, just you can't see it in the list. That also stops filenames being reused because derp - hence why a lot of mod makers suffix test mods with "test" etc and end up re-releasing them with "fixed" and other such things.
I'm all for a better mod system, or at the very least a way of singling out the good ones & having them placed separately from the others; possibly categorised as suggested above. The original uploader of a mod should be able to overwrite the file too, removing the need for a stack of test & fixed releases.
The underlying issues with the uploader & list would have to be addressed first before anything else.