I would like to highlight that RoboCup, as do many other organizations, conferences and journals, ultimately rely on the involvement of the scientific community. For example, I don’t think many journals or conferences exist that only rely on elected committee members to handle the entire review process. In the past years, we have seen a couple of problems with this approach. First and foremost, due to the sheer number of submissions and a TC with currently only 7 members, it is not possible to provide high-quality and detailed reviews for all teams. This makes it difficult for teams to improve their qualification material. By sharing the work between the TC and the community, we hope to increase the overall quality of the application process, but also to make it more transparent to the teams. In the end, we hope that everyone will benefit from this.
I think RoboCup and ordinary conferences are quite comparable. In ordinary conferences, many of the reviewers submit papers themselves, thus their own paper directly competes with the ones being reviewed. And similar to ordinary conferences, in case of doubt or concern, the TC (or program committee) will make the final decision whether a team is qualified or not. If factors other than the qualification material would overwrite a decision (such as forfeit in the previous tournament), those submissions are desk-rejected anyway and will not be send out to reviewers. Thus, the reviews by each team will matter as much as the review by the TC members.