I really agree with you in that paragraph, because the ease of registering an account should be considered again to avoid spam
While many here on Steemit like to complain about the slow sign up process, I myself am glad that new registrations are carefully considered from being from fake users or emails. Back in the beginning of Steem it was a lot easier to create accounts and obviously the abuse was much higher of fake or clone accounts. I believe its a good decision to early on try and fight these, we've already experienced some form of spam either in comments or voting/following and if there were no borders this could get out of hand quickly