I'm looking at this from the business perspective. It doesn't make much sense to try to get us much people to join as possible, if we know that their experience will suck. The users retention rate will be low and the brand of Steemit will suffer.
It would be much better to focus on the user experience first and let new users buy their own accounts. That would make the whole ecosystem much more valuable faster than focusing only user signups.
Have to disagree with you there. Facebook and Twitter didn't grow to millions of users by requiring an initial investment. I think requiring an up-front investment would kill growth.
The value of connected systems often comes from the network effect and who can get it faster. Craig's List isn't a great UX/UI, but they have the network effect lead. Steemit needs exponential growth in order to have a chance at overtaking the incumbents. Yes, some will sign up, have a bad experience, and leave. It's a numbers game. How many will we lose based on how many will we keep? That should be how we prioritize things. If we get the network effect value, those who left will eventually come back, hopefully to a better UI by then.
Steem is totally different ecosystem. First of all, this is a blockchain and there is a cost for creating a new account. FB and Twitter can create as much accounts as they like, basically without any cost. We can't.
Just look at how much money people are throwing in the blockchain world. A Steem account is valuable cryptoproperty, it's not only a login name to a social media site. We should let our users know this, rather than acting like a Steem account doesn't have any value at all.
And of course I understand how important it is to have way to get accounts for those who, for some reason, don't want to or can't buy an account. In an earlier post I proposed that SBD should be replaced with Steem account token (one SAT gives a right to create one account) and users could earn them as rewards. That would make the system more viral and decentralized.
Read the OP again. ;-)
I know very well the network effect. But it's too simplistic to think that only thing that matters is the number of users. It can turn to a negative thing, too. That leads to chaos.