I'll start off by addressing the elephant in the room. It's been the better part of a year since the announcement that Code Review was graduating. In all those months, there haven't been any visible indications of change from us on the team. There are a few reasons for that, but they all come down to "it's our fault." I know that we've generated a lot of anxiety over what should have been a happy event, and on behalf of the entire team, I sincerely apologize.
Part of the problem is that under our current system, graduation is heavily tied to site design, and we have a backlog on getting designs to sites. We're currently working on decoupling those two events, in response to the pain you've felt on Code Review and the feedback we've gotten at Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites (a recent post on the network meta site about how we view the site lifecycle generally). Most of those changes aren't ready to be rolled out yet — keep watching meta over the next several weeks for updates — but I do have one bit of good news for you now.
We recently did a trial run of an election on a site without the rest of the graduation features in place, and it was a success. So, I'm happy to announce that Code Review's first moderator election will begin on Monday, June 29, 2015! Please join me in thanking 200_success, rolfl, Jamal and the pro tem mods who served before them for all their hard work in getting Code Review to where it is today.
One other note to be filed under "graduation update": I've noticed over the past few months, in a few places on chat and meta, some concerns (both explicit and implied) that Code Review's graduation might be (or at least appear to be) somehow diluted or irregular. I want to be absolutely clear that that is not the case. There is no asterisk next to CR's graduation. The team completely agreed that this site deserved to graduate based on the regular review process. For that matter, the site clearly continues to qualify under the current criteria, as well.
Part of the problem is that under our current system, graduation is heavily tied to site design, and we have a backlog on getting designs to sites
. Why not ask site users for design input. Not everyone is a graphic designer, but lots of folks have good ideas about what they're passionate about and that can serve as fodder for the in-house design team. Heck, there are a lot of people out there who do all sorts of web design as a side interest/business that are probably reasonably decent at it. They could provide a full mock-up that might significantly reduce the work load. \$\endgroup\$