You know, there have been threads that discussed this at length pretty recently.
Here's one (that isn't the one I was looking for):
click me
There's more out there. I particularly remember one where someone was talking about watching a couple of 6th dan tests and being unimpressed, and how that made him (I think it was a him) about his own testing. I thought the discussion there was very interesting, and if someone remembers where that post is, can you please paste it in?