Hey jringo,
I see your point, but as soon as a project gets whitelisted, the Gridcoin distribution happens automatically. As I understand it, this might be a way to finance little projects with just some 1000 WUs or so, adding the GRC rain to attract crunchers quickly! But well, same here, I could be wrong as well! ;)
I think the intent is perfect. Have you read @nightshift1134's idea found here?
I detail how his idea might look and what it achieves in my comment to that post.
I'm interested to hear what you think of that approach of helping little projects instead of an open rain mechanism which makes GRC more like its competitors which have very different goals than Gridcoin.
Little projects get the attention of new users and philanthropic whales!