Lol! You can blame the plethora of "Barbie-doll" barely clothed, if clothed at all with a sword images on Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell for inspiring such things (and yes I'm guilty of creating such as well).

Anywhoo....I like the two-tiered system idea.  Obviously as stated already, it is really going to take a lot of thught as to how it gets implemented and managed.

First, the uploader is going to have to decide wether they think it is good enough for Second Tier and should IMO have to provide not only a description of the item, but a written justification upon upload as to why they think it is worth getting paid for.  This way whoever is "judging" the item has a better idea of what they are looking at before ever opening the file.

Some items that could be included in the uploader's justification:

- Amount of time spent creating the item

- Amount of time spent on testing the item prior to upload.  This would include testing time spent by others (outside beta testers), if any.

- What features does the item have that makes it stand out from other similar items?

Now granted this would mostly apply to models, plug-ins, software and software content.  Images and animations naturally would be judged by simply viewing them, but then you run into the potential for biased judging as an image may be wonderful, just not to the taste of the person(s) judging it, at which point you'll either have worthy pieces getting rejected becasue of bias, or you'll get crappy pieces accepted because of the fear of being labeled as biased.