In my view, role-players are the most important asset a role-playing corporation can have. I understand that standings are kind of easy to check and so on, but I don't see them leading to any kind of interesting RP. Aren't they more like an indication that the applicant, or the corporation, likes monotonous grinding and minmaxing?
Wouldn't it make more sense to evaluate whether the applicant is devoted, makes good initiatives, follows his internal logic, is willing to do research, can deal with differing opinions and so on? If a mission running corporation uses grinding rewards as a recruitment condition, that makes sense, but I just don't see the RP point of adhering to this flawed mechanic even after DM's have ditched it.
Yes and no.
Yes, RP is really important. But there are some Rpers out there who will happily kill a corp/alliance using Corp theft and betrayal, and yes, that can kill a corp or alliance; or people who can fake being an RPer for a while and then do it. Many of the indications of this include things that are also true for normal new players, and long term inactive Alts can present as other than what they are.
One point of this mechanic is to spot people who RP competently but who are lying in some way. Building a legitimate history can be hard. The more they can obscure or hide the deficiencies in their character history, the harder it is to detect them.
No, it doesn't catch everyone. It's not necessary or sufficient evidence of a potential infiltrator, but it does flag warnings for some of them.
There is a significant OOC component here because you are protecting your corp and your players OOC as well as IC. The ties that you can build up with people you play with OOC over time are valuable to me and I think to other people, and I've seen situations where this was damaged by infiltrators. I can decide if I want to do /sip RP in the Last Gate, but I don't get to decide if I want to play in a corp with infiltrators or not.
It would be nice to be able to trust all the other RPers in Eve not to screw over your corp if you let the "PC glow" gloss over inconsistencies in their stories, but you can't. Such is Eve.