This is probably controversial but I would like to see Triage and Low Quality Posts merged and have Help and Improvement, First Posts, and Late Answers removed/merged as well.
Triage and Low Quality Posts are incredibly similar from the point of view of a reviewer. You determine if the post is of sufficient quality and if it isn't vote to close it. If it looks ok but needs formatting changes you hit edit otherwise you say it looks ok. If you are unsure you skip. That makes perfect sense to me.
The only real difference between these queues is that you can't actually edit the post in the Triage queue. This seems dumb to me. The only time you should click requires editing is when the post has formatting issues: any issues with the question itself that only the asker can fix must be handled with the close votes. If you can identify formatting issues, you can fix them, so it makes no sense that it gets put onto another queue when the current reviewer could have handled it already.
Having separate queues for Triage, First Posts, Low Quality Posts, Help and Improvements, and Late Answers seems a bit pointless to me. Most of these queues have very few posts in them especially on other stack exchange sites and they all do very similar things. Late Answers and First Posts both allow reviewers to vote and comment on posts as well as editing and flagging, and Help and Improvement allows editing and commenting.
Why separate all of these queues when the review process is pretty much the same for all of them? In all of them the goal is to improve posts that can be edited and provide guidance to the poster where necessary. Surely it would be better to have one queue that encompassed all of those requirements and allowed votes, comments, editing, and voting to close if needed with the goal of rewarding good content with upvotes, improving content that could be improved with edits, and filtering out content which is unsuitable with close votes.
I personally think that the following queues make sense:
- Close votes - to confirm that posts should be closed.
- Reopen votes - to confirm that posts should be reopened.
- Suggested edits - to validate edits by users.
- Triage - to handle posts from new users, low quality posts, late answers, and anything else that is potentially poor quality.
The new triage queue would have "Looks OK", "Edit", "Recommend Deletion", and "Skip". Vote to close would put it onto the close vote queue. Edit would allow you to edit the post inline just like the Low Quality Posts queue as this would make it absolutely clear that you should only click edit if you can edit the post. Voting and comments could be enabled as well so reviewers could leave feedback on the post as needed and can upvote good posts.
I feel this would allow us reviewers more freedom to handle a post in the way that we know it should be handled rather than in the way the review queue forces us too. I'm always annoyed when I want to upvote or comment on a post in a queue which doesn't allow for those actions or when I want to edit a post to fix the obvious formatting errors but all I can do is mark it as requires editing and hope someone else does it. The improved triage queue would be focused on improving already good content via editing and direct feedback (with votes and comments) and would filter out bad posts using close votes.