Hi MGRC,
First, congratulations for being recognized by the community as the best for this job, and thank you for undertaking the responsibility!
Kudos for the first meeting, and for setting the tone of transparency and open discussion on its content. Now that you’ve mapped the tasks at hand, I would like to offer my assistance in any way I can help you execute them. (My experience with prior ZF grants, many other grant contexts (on both the receiving and funding side, and advising ZF on its new grant system, might be pertinent.)
Regarding the grant application/tracking system and decision process, here’s a couple of thoughts:
Community engagement is paramount
We have people in the community who are domain experts, or are the actual prospective users, or who would be the ones to support/integrate the proposed work, etc. We should get them engaged in the evaluation of proposals, and even in proposing improvements to the proposals. Creating these dynamics requires proactive planning and significant ongoing work, but it’s worth it.
We did this in the first two (committee-based) ZF grant rounds, so we know it’s doable. Specifically, the old ZF grant committees relied not just on their personal knowledge, but also strived to be curators of knowledge and opinion, by actively seeking input and distilling it into explicitly-justified consensus decisions. You can see the results in the summaries of these structured rounds (2017Q4 and 2018Q2; further context in a brief history of Zcash decentralization).
The downside is that this engagement, comprehensiveness and transparency are very time consuming. They were too slow and heavyweight for some of the small grants that the old ZF committees had on their table, though the effort may be more to scale for Major Grants.
ZF’s grant system is currently inadequate
IMHO, ZF’s new grant system completely failed the above goal. It inadvertantly discouraged community engagement. Very few people used the new system (which was unfamiliar, clunky and simplistic, thus initially even worse than the GitHub-based system it replaced). There were almost no community contributions to the discussion, very little transparency on the decision process, and often no published rationale. For a long time there was not even a way for the public to see submitted proposals until after ZF’s funding decision was made.
There are ideas for how to improve this at the technical level, e.g., by integrating the proposal discussions into the forum and several other open issues. So there’s hope! But to stress, this will require more than prioritizing issues and writing software. It will require a mindset, framing, communication, and active outreach to breath life into any system you choose.
So as I said, thanks for undertaking the responsibility. 
The Zcash community (me included) is here to help you carry it out.