1) GBP 2,000 still seems steep to me. Assuming I'll have to pay an scientific editor (who selects reviewers, forwards manuscripts and decision revisions, etc) GBP 100 per hour, he could spend 10 work hours on the article -- total cost: GBP 1,000. I realize that there's a large variance on time required though, depending on how referees and authors agree, but 10 hours seems at the upper end of the spectrum. Of course, if we'll have to pay a typesetter + infrastructure, GBP 2,000 might be where we'll end up. However, I have the impression that these proposals offload all typesetting to the authors.

2) Can you enlighten me (or suggest reading) on how HN ranks submissions? I've had discussions about some sort of ranking of papers, but we generally concluded that the sheer amount of papers published daily would make it tough to get enough (>10?) votes for being somewhat representative I imagine (for example, astro-ph on arxiv sees 50-100 submissions daily). But as you suggest, some algorithm doing preliminary ranking might help this (although it also spells danger).