They are not being offered an incentive to power up, they are being forced out. Someone joins the blockchain and comments "hi, i am new here." and thats it, he can't do anything more. He doesn't even know what mana is or what powering up means. And he has to wait 5 days before he can ask another question.
Who has patience for that. I would have moved on if that was the experience I had when I first joined and I am a very patient man.
They didn't get the memo? What memo? Maybe someone should write the memo. I remember when I signed up I was given a list of rules. "Don't forget your password" was all I was told. I'm not sure how it is now but creating awareness on day one, as one signs up, offering some guidance and stressing the importance of this guidance would probably be a good step in the right direction rather than assuming nothing can be done and all is lost.
Bandwidth system worked fine for me since day one. It allowed for spam and that needs to be checked. Thr are lot of ways to do that. Question is, are resources being consumed to the level that legit user is not able to transact and answer is no. We have ample of resources. Why ration something that is not scarce?
I think, for now it might not make sense on the surface and of course will require a bit of tweaking to find that sweet spot, but down the road we'll be thanking ourselves for dealing with this stress now rather than the problems later.