One thing to consider though is that if they start charging premiums to get approved quickly it may seem like they are just trying to get users money by onboarding the paying members quickly and letting the free users go by the way side.
It doesn't only support Steemit Inc but the whole community. If steem was bought from the markets, it would create more demand for steem and that way benefit everybody who owns steem.
This could over-all be very damaging to the platform as most users prefer not to pay for internet services until they know they have value. I think a "pay-to-play" system might actually hurt them.
I think this could be mitigated quite well by explaining that a Steem account is valuable cryptoproperty. It's backed by steem tokens which have value. Every account necessarily owns some steem because it's required when the account is created.
For those who don't want to pay there should be an option to get to the waiting list for a free account.