Course Merchant: send email when "require verification" order is denied

In writing this question, I discovered a documentation page about "require verification" orders that states "An order cannot be denied via the system." Therefore, I don't think this ask is possible, but I figured I would ask anyway and see if any details could be shared as to how the system currently works.

For our use case, we have a free course offering that we want to make available to only a certain subset of participants. With guidance from the Course Merchant team, we set this up as a "require verification" course so that: 1) it is listed as free; and 2) we can approve only those who should be eligible to take the course.

For users who are approved to take the courses, this has worked well so far. Once approved, the system sends a follow-up email to inform them that they are now enrolled in the course. For users who do not meet the criteria and are denied, to mark them as such we update their order status to "cancelled". In this process, no automated email from the system is sent to inform these users that their verification was rejected.

Is it possible to send an automated email upon verification rejection? Why does the system not allow for orders to be denied?

Relatedly, in order to approve an order, it seems as though you must click the "Approve" button on the list of all orders and not by updating the order status to "completed" when viewing the order details. This has led to a slight annoyance with the system as in order to verify the order, we must open it to view the details. But then to actually approve the order, we have to go back, remember the order we were just evaluating, and click "approve" elsewhere.