There's no forcing going on. The policy from Day One has been that we work on what the content providers submit. Sometimes works that look enticing or valuable to them aren't appealing to the proofers, and then take a long time to wend their way through the system. (Some texts, like Greg Week's science fiction stories, zip through in days.)
Works that CP'ers submit which are stuck on the queues AREN'T being worked on. People who volunteer for DP are forced to work on things not stuck on queues. That IS the forcing going on. Work that progresses slowly through the Proofing rounds aren't really the problem. The problem is more works that get stuck in the formatting rounds and the PP rounds. What I've seen stuck in the proofing rounds has sections, such as huge sections of publishers ads, or indexes, which most Proofers get tired of pretty quick -- especially when the work is classified as "Easy." I would question the judgment of including publishers' ads when they aren't even numbered pages nor relate to the subject matter. Let's try to break this down again in a way that SHOULDN'T be controversial: 0) Premise: DP people ARE acknowledging that having books stuck on queues 3.5 years is not a good thing. If this is NOT a good thing, then SOMETHING has to change. If one wants to change the queuing times there is really ONLY a couple things fundamentally that one can change: 1) You can reduce that rate at which content is placed onto the queues. That implies SOME kind of principle of selection. The principle right now is "First Come First Serve." I suggest this is not a good thing for several reasons: Books may be put on the queue that people really don't want to work on. Books may be put on the queue that people really don't want to read. And books may be put on the queue that take time and energy disproportional to the societal benefit to be gained from that book compared to some other books. Note there are about 50 million books available worldwide that could be worked on by DP, compared to 2500 roughly a year created by DP, implying a queuing time for books in general of 20,000 years -- not including those books that will have risen to the public domain in those 20,000 years! Another way of saying this is that the selection process used to decide which books get "rescued" by DP is on the order of 1 book in 10,000 gets saved. Now, if only one book in 10,000 gets saved, should this be "at random" or should there be some kind of selection process -- even if it were only that the DP volunteers who are going to do the work vote on what gets put on the queue? 2) You can increase the rate at which content is taken off the queues. This requires placing more resources at those places in the queues where things are getting bogged down, which are P3, F2, and PP. To place more resources at these places requires at least SOME tweaking of DP's current system of "technological high priesthood" and would require getting over DP's current idea that somehow they are creating "perfect books" [which they certainly are NOT doing!] 3) You can increase productivity by improving tools -- particularly tools helping P3, F2, and PP. Producing tools that help P1 is pretty easy, as many people have suggested, but, it is actually NOT obvious that improving tools for P1 would prove to be helpful to DP overall! Making P1 faster and easier without changing the current rules of "technological high priesthood" will actually only make the queuing problems more extreme.