The two statements in paragraph one (two different statements) does not accurately represent what the editors have said.
(1) It is false that sites are included based on editorial interest. Sites are included based on editorial JUDGMENT, which is emphatically not the same thing. If we review a site we're not interested in (and active editors have reviewed thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites that they are not personally interested in) we still list it if it's listable. And no editor has said otherwise.
(2) Editors choose priorities based on many things. It is a misrepresentation to suggest that it's "personal interest" to the exclusion of any other factor. Personal interest is only one factor. It is and ought to be an important factor -- how better could we tell what surfers in general are interested in, except by using the large sample of surfers who are editors? But no factor, up to and including pure random shut-your-eyes-and-pick-a-category, can be eliminated. The more factors, the more robust the process, and if we're going to tell people the TRUTH about the ODP, that is an important aspect.
(3) It is a blatant falsehood to say that sites ARE NOT added based on site suggestions, when hundreds of thousands of sites HAVE been added based on site suggestions. Likewise, it is not true that site suggestions are "rarely" acted on -- there are certainly thousands of suggestions acted on daily. (Of course, some of those actions are "do not list". Maybe we ought to just add something in the ODP submittal policy that says "no site is guaranteed a listing". Oh ... it's already there.)
(3) "bla bla bla ... up to several years and even longer ... bla bla bla ... not on a queue basis" -- is neither more precise nor more concise than "review times cannot be predicted." Why not just say that? "review times cannot be predicted?" And then when people assume "this site will be reviewed in less than six months", or "this site has been waiting for 2 years, must have been reviewed already," then anyone who can read can just whack the speculator with a clue stick and say, "bad submitter! no predictions from you!"
But, assuming you corrected the misstatements, you'd still be dealing with a fundamental misapprehension. You've just introduced a statement proposed as an official ODP pronunciamento. But what in all that statement could or should stand as official?
What's official is what's published: mission, social contract, editor guidelines, submittal policy. We mostly haven't been talking about official policies. We mostly don't need to -- they're published on the official site. What we've expressed is our individual and collective experience in and around the ODP. Look at your paragraph again, skipping the false parts:
(1) The official ODP position is that suggestions will be looked at. (In practice, of course, this means "kept until looked at.") That's all. There is no official position on how many of your fellow site suggestors are spammers, and why should there be? And indeed, EXPERIENCE says the proportion is different in different categories anyway. In the same way, there can be no official position on what percentage of sites come from different sources -- there is no way of tracking that information anyway. What we've been saying represents our own individual editing experience, and the fact that multiple editors have said similar things suggests that the experience is widespread if not universal. But that does not make it official!
(2) "The ODP" can not possibly have any official statement about "how it doesn't operate." There may be editors who DO "operate on a queue basis" -- I've heard a few claim to do that. Most of us agree that's not ideal. Certainly, the more experience one has, the better one knows WHY it's not ideal.
(3) The ODP can have no official statement on what "popularity" means -- certainly there is no way of tracking it, so there can be no official position on whether popular categories or unpopular ones get updated more often. Most intervals between updates are very irregular, so "often" can have only a probabilistic definition. And ... it just isn't worth trying to explain probability to most people. (Look how popular lotteries are!)
Again, the ODP can't make official statements about its use in search engines. Only the search engines know for sure; only they can make official statements. Some editors (hi, jean!) take an interest in that for their own reasons, and are happy to share what they know. That's just another kind of personal experience.
Again, it's not the place of the ODP to officially solve the problem of how SERP perp misconceptions arise. There are, I think, many sources. A sufficiently illogical person doesn't need much of a start anyway, and internet marketing, um, doesn't attract the Dr. Spocks of the universe. But that's just one opinion, and it's really not worth speculating over. You just tell people the truth, and see how many of them can get over their presuppositions.
The ODP has no official position on relative page rank of sites, and why should it pontificate on the subject? Anyone who is interested in page rank can just LOOK at Google. (Page rank wasn't a concept when the ODP started. It's not a concept relevant to the ODP anyway. (Why not put in a statement that the ODP doesn't eradicate Malaria or feed starving polar bears? At some point, you have to figure people who want to know what the ODP does will either ask or read the official statement of what the ODP does. You'll find no mention of Malaria, or polar bears, or page rank in it. And that should be enough.
It has not always been true that the ODP doesn't provision any search engine: I don't know if it's true now. (How many search engines are there?) But there is nothing in the ODP policies that forbid such a thing. Ergo, it wouldn't be appropriate to claim it doesn't happen.
I think this illustrates how complex the subject is, and how absolutely certain to be misunderstood if you try to apply binary "true-false" logic to a stochastic process with "multiple heterogenous servers with adaptive optimization" and "tendancies" and "probabilities." You just can't say "does" or "does not" happen this way, without being false and misleading. And "tendancies" have no predictive value for single events.
If we're going to say something, here's the bumper sticker version of the secret inner life of the ODP:
It's complex. Don't try to predict it, you can't. Don't try to manipulate it, it will backfire painfully. If it's what you want, take it and welcome! If not, thanks for visiting, tell your friends.
But honestly now, does this make sense? If a simple link from the ODP to the base url of my site could 'catapult' the dovecotes page up Google's SERPs all by itself, why wouldn't a direct link to the specific page on Bristol Bridge work wonders in Google for that page? 
