Trademasters should be able to do this:

DESIGN PRIORITY

to set a particular design in the SUBMIT state in the queue as higher priority. They can only have one item set that way in any cartel; setting one item to priority removes any other in that cartel's queue from priority.

This is simply a way to flag a design as more urgent to the Charites. There's no obligation on the part of the Charites to pay attention to this flag; they can work on whatever designs they want, whenever they are able. But if they have no particular reason to do any one design more than any other, they can use this flag as a tiebreaker.

Whatever commands the Charites use to see lists of pending designs would have something added to show a star next to priority items, or list them nearer the top, or something.

Agreed. This would be a very simple, very nice feature to have.

Maybe stick a restriction on it? Each trademaster is allowed 3 high priority submissions a year, or something?

Why?

Seems that'd just add complexity and coding work. "One at any one time" is probably easier to implement, and keeps things nicely limited so it won't overwhelm the Charites.

My concern is that people would set this, then when the designs didn't come back instantly, whine about it. Then the Charites would say, "feh, why did we even give them this just so they could whine even more!" And that the likelihood of this outcome is why it probably won't get done. So we would all have to agree not to misuse this as an excuse to whine.

When ever you post I feel like those rainbow musical notes are going to jump out at me. Not all together an unpleasant thought I suppose but it is rather startling.

Now that this massive event is mostly over the Design team is working to try and chip away at the massive backlog of designs pending review. It is a very time consuming process so please be patient with us while we work our way down the list.

a priority thing might still be nice. I know I've made things years later that I actually want reviewed before the things I submitted years ago.

The priority flag doesn't even have to be exclusive; set as many designs as "priority" as you'd like, as this is self-controlling. If you set all your designs are "priority" ones, then no designs are.

ETA: Obviously I assume the Charites read designs by order of submitter, clearing the backlog of each cartel in turn.

I appreciate that, but that's not really what this is intended to address. The idea isn't to get approvals done faster in general, it's just to highlight a particular one over the others. For instance, most of mine in the queue are just to expand the catalog, but a couple are commissioned ones for particular customers. It'd be nice to slide those ahead of others that are less important. Has nothing to do with changing the overall rate of approvals.