I'd like to clear something up here. Yes, both Debian and FreeBSD have official package committers and it takes a lot of time/effort to get that official status, however their roles are quite different. In the Debian camp a committer is responsible for packages they enter into the distribution which means committers usually only work on packages they personally find useful or interesting. I have submitted a handful of packages to Debian committers and they were all rejected. Not because of errors or licensing, but because the committer did not want to take on more work, looking after a package they had no interest in.
On FreeBSD official committers also look over submitted packages and test them, but the FreeBSD commiter is not responsible for maintaining the package and keeping it up to date, the submitter is. As a result, FreeBSD committers rarely reject packages (unless there there is a security issue or they fail to build properly). They can accept any valid/secure package without worrying about the extra burden of looking after the package in the future.
This means FreeBSD can have relatively few committers (who check security/syntax) but a lot of submitters who maintain the packages. Debian tends to have a lot of committers, but few submitters outside of that core group because submitted packages are often ignored/rejected.
I'm not comparing the process to becoming an _official_ committer in my article above, I'm comparing the process for submitting and getting new packages accepted.