I now think the tag request system works as intended. In order to find and tag the items that merit it, it would be helpful if you nominated those assets you find to be of very high quality for the "community favorite" tag. Likewise, if you find something broken, nominate it for a "broken" tag.
You can request that an item be tagged here: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/tagrequests.html
Further, the clothes list can now be filtered to only include "community favorite" items. Eventually I'll implement this for the other lists too, but the clothes list is the largest so I started there.