Interesting, but for me I see the flip side to this as well.

Long time back (for me) I transferred from Verisign to DirectNIC and it took over 30 days for the transfer to go thru. Verisign kept refusing the transfer request even though I had approved it.

To me all I see this as ICANN attempting to weed out the small time rip off registrars or sloppy ones who can't get the procedure done.

I mean how many times have we heard about how long its taken to get a domain transferred from one registrar to another?

As I read the new changes it simply means that if you don't reject the request it'll go through automatically... in other words any current domain registered still needs you to approve or deny the change but you only got 5 calendar days instead of forever.

Like anything I see the other side as well where someone could steal a domain or two if the owner isn't vigilant or the company they use doesn't follow up requests immediately. Still its 6 of one, half dozen of another.

just my warped opinion
Ian