1. I may already start sounding like a notorious proponent of flagged revisions / pending changes, but for me this is what all this stuff is about. I was doing NPP for half a year in Russian Wikipedia (I was one of the first patrollers), then NPP were replaced by FR and I was doing FR for two and a half years, about 3K revisions per month (excluding autopatrol). For me, it is just a logical continuation of NPP, since (a) it fixes the 30 day problem - now every article can be patrolled, not just those which got into main space very recently - and this is logical, since we have a lot of old stuff which is inappropriate, and NPP/FR is a mechanism to coordinate effort of users looking at these articles systematically; (b) once one does this, one also realizes that even an article which is ready for the mainspace can be made inappropriate for the main space, for instance by being vandalized or by being subject to introducing copyrighted material or whatever. And then one would need to patrol it on a regular basis. And the most logical thing to do if one wants to coordinate this effort is to facilitate patrolling of a single edit - which is FR. Let us see how the RFC which was promised to us will run. As an intermediate solution, I do not have such a good knowledge of mediawiki, but I assume that unpatrolled pages remain unpatrolled forever, so that there should be a way of bot-creating list of pages which failed to be patrolled in 30 days and which still could be patrolled, but I do not know how to do it.
2. I agree with that. Is this smth which needs technical means to implement?
3. Actually, I think this ONE statement - that the article is almost ready for the main space - can be implemented by a template or by a hidden cat. But then it should be indeed understanding what NPP is. There was a similar situation indeed on Russian Wikipedia, when some users though a patrolled article is ready for the main space, and others marked everything which had categories and was not a blatant copyvio. The idea with three or more colours id excellent, but it obviously requires discussion and I do not know how easy it is to realize.