This is insanity.
Indeed! As if half of the world would be waiting to join STEEM. We urgently need new users, much more than they need us - so we should make it as easy and pleasant as possible for them to join! Even if it is for free, I always have to work hard to convince new people to create a STEEM account. Most of them wouldn't sign up if the first thing they had to do was paying for it.
I have had to pay to open accounts for others, because I knew if they waited for @steemit to open their accounts, they would have lost interest and probably ignored the email after waiting for weeks.
Sometimes it feels like they brainstormed all the things that would prevent new users, almost as affectively as they made it to mine the coin, that has created the skewed distribution of STEEM power amongst users.