I came to this forum from the email too, and because I was a DMOZ editor for 6 or 7 years. I've read through all the topic posts, including some from former editors. I can understand the complaints, because getting listed in the Open Source Directory will put your site on the map. Don't underestimate its importance.

But unless you've been an editor, you have no idea what these people have to deal with, volunteering in their free time. When I volunteered, you could run a cat you had experience in and list your own site(s). If that's changed, I'm not aware of it. I originally went out searching for competitors who had exceptional sites and listing them, because that was the job I volunteered for. After a while, the queue was getting very long and I spent less time searching for worthy sites. After another while, the queue in my cat became close to unmanageable. It wasn't just spam, which was a full time job in itself, but site developers played some pretty sophisticated games to get multiple listings for content that was really horrible, knock-offs, ripoffs, ponzi schemes....

We weren't supposed to judge the content, only if it fit our category, and that was my rule. Occasionally I'd get fooled by a spammer and list them and get rung up by a Meta Editor. Then there were the anquished emails I'd get from people who had been in the queue for a month or more. I would try to help them; I tried to keep up with the queue, and it wasn't long before this "spare time volunteer work" had turned into a monstrous burden. The last straw came when I tried to help an emailer and found that he had listed his site in the wrong cat and it had to go to another editor's queue. He sent me a bunch of angry foaming emails, until I finally had to /dev/null his stuff. Then he complained to a Meta, who took my side, bless her heart. But at that point, I'd had enough.

My advice to people complaining about DMOZ is to volunteer. Or, you can probably complain to AOL. Maybe it'll end up being an expensive paid directory staffed by full time editors like Yahoo some day. The bottom line is, there is probably one legit site for every hundred spammed sites submitted, and somebody has to wade through all the crap to find the jewel legit site you're trying to submit. Until it becomes expensive, don't expect any changes. But feel free to complain :-)