and what if the nxt community IS the committee ?...
nxt api could be used/hacked to make a poll system, with messaging included. Any user could create a poll for a project with reward. If there is enough votes (% of the community ?), the project is launched. Moreover, it could be possible to add api calls to register apps, returning a unique app/project token-id, which allows to count numbers of registered users and votes for each app/projects afterwards, and gives the winner of the award.
Don't know exactly how this could be done now, but couldn't this be added to the API2 ?
The voting system could be designed to do such thing. And that's the idea behind the choice of freezing the fund until we have the infrastructure to do so in place
But if the community insists on spending now, there is no other way except forming a committee.