I haven’t forgotten about it. If you check out the handbook PR, you’ll see it’s a known part of the flow. I’m not calling this a “no-blockers” workflow for that reason - there’s still a big blocker in the middle, if it introduces new features or changes the UI/UX.
Yes, still move it to External Review/Blocker during the product review phase.
Yes: Nimisha has expressed a desire to grow the core committers program beyond just technical reviews, to include things like documentation reviewers, UI/UX reviewers, and hopefully also product reviewers. So that’s one possible way.
Another is: try to get the edX product review done early; it can happen even before any coding starts, if we open a proposal. Though I know we’ve tried this before with limited success. It also cannot be too much before or they may “retract” their approval later, if things change :/
We’re also discussing streamlining the overall process a bit, removing the internal review if there’s a core committer review anyway.