The idea that any kind of reasoned approval process occurred is, er, overstating things tremendously. 
The parser is the most brittle part of the Inform technology stack. It’s the only part which hasn’t been completely rethought since Curses. (Major surgery and expansion, but not a complete rethink.)
It’s also the piece that I don’t know how to tackle in an incremental way. A “Modern Inform Parser” would require I6 language support and maybe VM support, because I don’t see how to do it without closures and reliable dynamic data structures(*). It’s already been dragged as far as it can go on globals and fixed-size arrays.
(* Are the I7 versions of these features sufficient? I don’t think so, although maybe I’m wrong.)