It is just that no one else is reckless enough to bypass the review process

I keep seeing this notion crop up.

I want to kill this idea right now:

There were months of public discussion leading to up the authoring of BIP 101, both on this mailing list and elsewhere.
BIP 101 was submitted for review via the normal process. Jeff Garzik specifically called Gavin out on Twitter and thanked him for following the process:

https://twitter.com/jgarzik/status/614412097359708160

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/163

As you can see, other than a few minor typo fixes and a comment by sipa, there was no other review offered.
The implementation for BIP 101 was submitted to Bitcoin Core as a pull request, to invoke the code review process:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6341

Some minor code layout suggestions were made by Cory and incorporated. Peter popped up to say there was no chance it'd ever be accepted ..... and no further review was done.

So the entire Bitcoin Core BIP process was followed to the letter. The net result was this. There were, in fact, bugs in the implementation of BIP 101. They were found when Gavin submitted the code to the XT community review process, which resulted in actual peer review. Additionally, there was much discussion of technical details on the XT mailing list that Bitcoin Core entirely ignored.