Yes, this is a site setting that could be relaxed in order for mappers to more easily participate by e-mail. (It looks like there’s also a setting for unknown e-mail addresses to post as “staged users” in the interim.)
We really need to revise vote durations for longstanding practices and tags. I’m sure I’m not the only one who found out about it after voting concluded.
It would seem to me to be common courtesy (for a few months at least) to also post import prooposals that merit it to the international mailing list too. That won’t apply to all of them of course.
Which import proposals? My impression is that almost all of them are limited to a specific country, if that. I don’t think we’re very likely to have more global automated imports like OurAirports or GEONames in the future. Our standards are too high for that these days.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about the proposal to shift proposal discussions to this forum, no existing process is a good fit for that proposal. Technically, it’s just a proposal to edit an article on the wiki, something we normally discuss on the article’s talk page, or perhaps Talk:Wiki for something more disruptive. It was good that @SherbetS reached out to the imports list (and @ElliottPlack reached out to the imports-us list) as a courtesy, as those lists were the primary audiences affected.
For something as longstanding as the import guidelines, it couldn’t have hurt to overcommunicate further, but I’m not sure the outcome would ultimately be any different. As @woodpeck has pointed out on behalf of the DWG, the most important thing is not the process but rather the results: there needs to be a robust discussion, and the import needs to be executed well.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable for the import guidelines to be more holistic and less prescriptive, but especially after seeing how this forum proposal played out, I’m not volunteering to make that edit. 