Whilst it is currently against the rules and therefore corruption for an editor to specifically accept money for a listing I believe that a revitalisation of the directory could be assisted by accrediting editors as professionals and regulating their behaviour and prices. As long as people can still get free listings and the quality of the directory is not compromised.
I just applied to become an editor on a very small section that has around 20 sites on it. Hopefully I'll get accepted.
I'm not talking about paying an editor to list sites, what they should do is actually hire someone and pay them like $30/hour or something to just review sites that pay the fee, so the person would still be impartial, but they'd just be constantly working through the applications. I mean and make DMOZ could start raising funds for new developments or something. Either way they need to streamline things a little bit and there are definitely people out there willing to pay to get in. I mean look at the Yahoo directory listing cost - $299, but you skip the waiting queue, and you get your site reviewed by a human editor, if DMOZ did something similar (but not guarantee listing) that would just be so much better. Has anyone ever started a petition or something for DMOZ to implement something like this?