This came up before and I mentioned that I clearly recall documenting all of the steps that I didn't do which are why Perl News doesn't require approval and can't be front-paged. The people who were interested in changing that could not find what I wrote. So I looked (again) and found only a small part of it. Quoting myself from the "pm-port wiki":

tye 2002-05-24
I fixed several things wrong with Perl News which included changes to perlnews (the node type), Perl News, perlnews display page, preview settings, vote settings, writeupmover, and perhaps a few others.

The first problem was that adding new Perl News actually added new poetry. Of course, I noticed this because someone added news so I wanted to move it into the proper section. However, the node type of perlnews uses the dbtable of perlnews in order to add a linklocation field which makes it impossible to simply "move" to/from that node type. But search internal code shows that this extra field is not used currently so I changed the node type to not use that dbtable and then made "Perl News" one of the available move-to types. And I made it so you can vote on "Perl News" nodes.

Since the work to set up the (unduely complicated) "approval link type" and related baggage has not been done, you can't "approve" Perl News nodes. This means that the approval nodelet won't show. Which means that some ppl can move a node to Perl News after which only editors will be able to move it anywhere else. The best solution is probably to create all of the baggage and make Perl News items require approval.

Unfortunately, that was before patches were well used. And it isn't really much like what I remember writing (which I probably wrote about fixing approval so that it did work for some other section).

So, anyway, someone besides me needs to either learn the really old (and ugly) approval system and the newer (flawed) approval system that ar0n wrote in hopes of replacing the old one (we currently use both of them) and then create the ugly hacks required to make the old one work on one more section and the probably minor changes to make the new one work (as well as it does) on it also.

Or someone could pick up the new approval system that would eliminate some really expensive SQL queries. I mostly wrote it years ago and castaway finished writing it and then even tested it (years ago now as well). It has been sitting around about 1/3 implemented hoping someone would start up on the next step again.

If we get that deployed, then making news approvable doesn't require ugly hacks.

Unfortunately, I'm barely finding spare time to finish some much more important PM work since I still have a job and a family, so I won't be spending time on either of those tasks any time soon.