It’s an interesting idea (and one suggested before). I don’t think this will have the intended effect though. So many players hacksucate and absolutely would /report pretty much any decent pvp’er. This would mean sentinel would be watching them just as it is currently, which would still have the same chance of false banning them as it does currently. Another problem is that those sentinel would pick up instantly would not get banned until they were reported. I have run into quite a few cheaters who were banned banned by sentinel just moments before I realized they were. That can be the difference between dying and living in a game.
As for appeals, yes, I agree, the current system is not the best. Having an appeal and appeal discussions makes no real sense to me since the appeal discussion can take significantly longer since so few are able to review them. Perhaps some suggestions could be thrown out that would work wonderfully. My best idea for helping would be making an appeal help guide (which could be linked in the appeal writing section) to inform players what to focus on and how to best create their appeal. This is not really a solution to how long it can take for appeals to reviewed, but may indirectly decrease how many need to create an appeal discussion due to better written appeals. (This May be a project I work on soon).
I think a solution could be the staff member alert thingy (as siggestion many times). As some people have suggested on the past, have a ranking system based on number of reports on a person. Then if a staff member is online and is wanting to spectate and get some bans (because we do still enjoy playing games), they could run a list command to show a list of top 10 reported online players from most to reported to least reported. There would be a notification in chat for the reporting player notifing that this is not the main way to report a player and that the best way would be to record and report, but if a staff member is online, they may come and watch. Reports on players would fade after 1-2 hours after the command was run.
This system would mean that those cheating and not getting banned by sentinel would accumulate reports and would be near the top of the list to be watched. I can’t really think of another system that could work without us getting constantly spammed with reports.