A loosely coupled set of highly trusted and capable security engineers who formed a group to audit such things that upon successful audit could place their seal of approval on a version I would support with a subscription in no time.

A large group of individuals would guard against any one or a majority being compromised by bribes or otherwise. Not entirely make such fraud impossible just less likely.

I see this similar to the Jepsen set of tests for a given database. A similar code test would be nice. But tough since patches and things would nullify the approval. Some tweaking to the idea would be nice but in general it’s almost a never adopt for me for security focused products because I don’t know if I can trust the creators. Why would I? I don’t have anything to go on.

There is another problem with that. Who will review the reviewers?

Can we be 100% certain that no one can buy such an approval from the reviewers and so on.. That is sad :| P.S. I'm probably just paranoic.

It has to begin with people that hat are above reproach. I’d submit the openBSD folks.