I've been considering raising my account_creation fee, and pressuiring Steemit, INC., to streamline account creation. Basically, it only hurts the growth of the platform for the flagship site require manual aproval of new accounts. The @steemit account should be used as a faucet, to provide new accounts with enough SP to interact with the community. You should be able to jump right in. But only they can decide to let the platform grow...
Accounts should be free. The onboarding process should be painless. We need help either way.
Well there are separate issues there. There is how much it costs, and there is preventing abuse. They have said that solving both of those are priorities, so I expect we will see some type of proposal relatively soon. I don't think making it cost more though is going to make the streamlining process go any faster though. Regardless of how much it costs, they will probably need to continue manually reviewing accounts until they are able to solve the problem of automated approval (with abuse prevention) programmatically.
Separate from the dev issues though, I do think that we should at least consider either raising the fee or raising the block size limit in order to deal with the bandwidth problem. I'm not 100% opposed to making bandwidth something you 'earn' (or buy) but we would have a lot of work to do as far as explaining and onboarding users into that experience if it is going to be how it is. The way it is right now, I think it is harming the user experience.