What do you say, should we give design-independent graduation a try?
I think that the design is the least important when graduating a site. If a site is ready, just let it graduate. Why hold back? I can't think of a valid reason to not let the site graduate.
Maybe it is useful for a site to see its 'implementation timeline', something that shows where in the process the site is, call it 'transparency'. This would prevent questions like 'but why is this there, but not here?', etc.