Yes, exactly. I've been reading your comments on MM and Hive on this topic and we have very similar thoughts on it.
We just need to get the right people, with the right experiences and skills in the right positions to review proposal requests, while being able to - as a collective - judge their results and being able to rotate them out.
One argument against it would probably be "why not create a separate proposal for each" and I'd say to that: "creating proposals and requiring enough votes to overtake the return proposal for attending an event or another small request is not feasible". That's what VP was created for and the idea still is valid, it just quickly grew from 50k per year to 1M per year without any way for the stakeholders to have direct influence. That's what the system should be able to help solve.
Cool. :) A possible way to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach is to have one proposal where the funding goes through reviewers. As a test. Could be a super small proposal (like a few hundred dollars or something). Maybe for a problem that stakeholders care about and it's currently unsolved, and there could be a small thing done to improve the situation at least somewhat.