Ah, so this is the vacation you mentioned 🙂 I'm glad you got to have a good break. Sounds like there are lots on cool things coming up in the near future.
As for the onboarding, your post reminded me that I originally used HiveOnBoard for my previous account and the process went smoothly, but I know that some people have written posts about trying to onboard non-Hivers and they've found the process too focus-intensive. It's because our attention spans these days are worse than goldfish. I can understand you wanting to limit the account credits just being used willy-nilly. I still think that paying for a signup isn't a bad thing. I did it this last time because it just seemed the easiest, but I suppose those that are not crypto savvy wouldn't know how to do it, so there is a necessity for a "free" sign up method when trying to onboard Web2 peeps.
Will be watching with interest.