But I think that is where the 'human editorial review' process comes into play. Freshmeat should not 'blanket refuse' all projects in the early stages of the development lifecycle. They should take a look at the submission and make a judgement call.
Our 'Spec Writing for Web-based Project Planning' project, for example, is piling up a bunch of useful information which is of interest and utility to Open Source developers. I know this because our project homepage is now the third most active entrypoint into Sohodojo! And the interesting thing is that only about a quarter of those folks come in by way of our 'active project' page at SourceXchange. By far, they arrive by search engine queries which include 'Open Source' and 'project planning' or 'project management'. So we see that there is interest and value in our work.
We'd sure like developers to be able to find us more directly via Freshmeat. Perhaps, they will consider a 'provisional status' for projects in the early stages of the development lifecycle... accepted with a 'produce a tangible result by this date or be dropped' category for specs and such?
Anyway, Dacta, thanks for your comments. Regardless of what Freshmeat does, my minor rant did have the positive effect of bringing in my first cert- votes! I'm inching my way out of Observer status!