Duane, I will respond to fragments of what you wrote:

no.  :)

Today, each CA defines its own classes.

It doesn't seem standardized at all.

IIRC, the first CA to have "classes" was Verisign.  I think some other
CAs have followed Verisign's lead in the definition of classes, and
have defined their own classes based loosely on Verisign's definitions.
But I wouldn't say that makes any of the class definitions standardized.

If I'm mistaken, and there is some body of work from some standards body
that is attempting to standardize classes, someone please enlighten me.

That's the sticky wicket.  Making a judgement.  You'll recall it was
the prospect of mozilla having to make judgements about CAs that got
us all down this long CA policy path in the first place.

If I may attempt to summarize where that got us, mozilla got out of the
judgement business.  It now relies on "qualified" and "independent"
third parties to make those judgements, based on any of a growing number :(
of sets of possible criteria for judgement.

Also, an important part of Mozilla's present policy is that it is based in
some large measure on what the CA says its own policies are.  The third
parties exist only to confirm that it honors its own stated policies.

I think we'd have to do something similar to what we've done with the
rest of the policy issues.  Perhaps mozilla's cert policy could require
the CAs to make some sort of self-identification of the "classes" of
assurance employed for each of their CA certs, and require that the
evaluators assess those claims.

That's an interesting list.  Here are a few observations about it.

1. It seems to deal only with verification of personal identity (e.g.
personal name), and not with organizational relationships.  If a person
wanted a cert that include "O=Mozilla Foundation", how would you verify
that the person is indeed affiliated with that organization?  A similar
question applies to DNSnames in SSL server certs.  The binding of
personal names/identities to organizational ones seems particularly
challenging to do well, as Juarj Bednar pointed out.

2. I think the idea of "police ID check" doesn't work in all nations.
In the US, where we don't (yet) have national ID cards, the closest thing
we have to ubiquitous ID is our drivers' licenses.  The police do not
issue drivers' licenses, and the police are not considered authoritative
with respect to the accuracy of the DLs.

Seems plausible.  Maybe the creators of trustbar?
Maybe we should be trying to recruit them to join the ranks of the
"main developers" (as you called them).

--
Nelson B