I suspect this is what they have in mind long term, for starters i'm guessing they are just going to filter both jobs and developers to a realistic starting poi

I suspect this is what they have in mind long term, for starters i'm guessing they are just going to filter both jobs and developers to a realistic starting point. For example, trashbin and "i want an ebay clone" elance style requests, and filter out the developers who claim to be able to do it for $500 in 12 days. That alone would cut down most of the crap you see on sites like elance. As for their fears (dsrguru posted) about people going out of band to work around 4% for a measly $140 I don't see how that would really come into it as a reason for doing the filtering. $140 is nothing to a developer for a guaranteed payment on completion, its also against the interests of the buyer as they may end up with subpar quality and an angry developer chasing them down for work they didn't really do to a reliable standard. Sure, there will likely be a few who try to work around it, but really they aren't the target market user to begin with (the i want ebay for 500$!!? types)