Steem at 15$ would bring the threshold to 300$? I don't want to imagine that.
All data is public, who created which accounts and where funds move. It just has to be done, we have the minds here to set it up.
With this carpet bombing approach we disincentivize new people even more. They don't have the reach, which is perfectly normal, but then they get penalized for it. Even if my project and others get over the threshold (which would require several millions in delegations when we keep up the amount of curation we do right now - besides that I'm not viewing it as our problem mainly, but a problem for the platform as a whole), small users will never feel like their voice matters unless they follow the big ones.