When you think about it, for some people the TR board is the only place to find other potential members. While high school pals usually make good teams (for many reasons), there are people who are really good at programming, but knows of nobody else that shares the same interests to help him out.
If a DB coder posts in a forum comprised of mostly C/C++ coders or BASIC haters, guess what would happen.
About the approval system, another idea is instead of waiting for the form to be approved by the mod before it is posted, what if another system was added, like the post would show up immediately, but it would have to be approved by a mod before people can reply to it? If it sucks, people can't bump it. Then when the mods have free time, they can go and approve the ones they see fit, instead of Rich or mods getting e-mail about new team requests.