Thanks for the thoughts @clevecross, let me see if I can address some of your concerns.

I really am not sure about the goal/direction of the initiative.

For reference, combating fraud and plagiarism has been happening for many months, from users doing it out of goodwill and honest intentions, and no rewards. These users also received flags on their own content often, from retaliation. In addtion, them spending their time and voting power of fighting this abuse is an opportunity cost compared to trying to earn a reward on a rewards-based platform.

Isn't this change a direct result of a member, or at least an affiliate, doggedly pursuing identity verification of someone not wanting revealed?

These posts are actually in response to non members whom have gotten far too carried away with hunting for verification. @steemcleaners has always followed the practices we preach in that post, however other steemians were unaware of our rules for verification-asking. So the post was meant to clarify our asks for verification, in the hopes that these non-members will understand better.

How are these "secret" members held accountable for their decisions and day to day interactions on the platform?

The members are held accountable by a group based reputation and the incentive for rewards. If any one member abuses the steemcleaners account, they abuse the whole group (and forfeit rewards), which will cause support for the group to dissipate (e.g. no more funding from @smooth or @nextgencrypto). So far, we have had absolutely no internal issues - as all our members have been fighting abuse long before being rewarded for it, we have maintained unit cohesion.

I ran into one member several weeks ago, I assume they are a member as they are apparently active in the abuse channel,

There are many non-members active in the SA-C channel, an unfortunately that includes trolls due to the nature of a public channel. I can tell you that none of our members would say that. Unfortunately due to the trolling issues, we have required our private members only channel.

I have seen lots of rewards being issues to various platform users from the wallet of @steemcleaners, but no notes as to what they are being rewarded for. I am not in any way crying foul, but I do like the idea of accountability for the funds when asking for support through funding.

I understand the concern over reward distribution, however I would encourage you to contact one of our financial supporters ( @smooth can probably help with this) if you would like to audit the payout structure. However, if you would like to audit the work associated with the payout, every single action the @steemcleaners account takes is logged and these logs are publicly released on the account. I encourage you to look through all the posts in our logs, and if you see behaviour you do not agree with, you can message me directly in steemit.chat and I will make sure action is taken.

I hope this addresses some of your concerns, and if you do have feedback for how we can better structure the group you're welcome to chat with me in steemit.chat. We're still a new initiative, and growth and change is bound to occur, we just need to make sure it's always in a positive direction.