I've been working on the onboarding too.

I make STEEM accounts available at eBay for people to use PayPal to purchase. Currently, I am adding 90 days delegation of about 20SP which I pay for. I'm trying to make these accounts as affordable as possible.

For the sake of onboarding, I hope that others do the same (even on eBay) and create competition.

One of my goals is education.
I also have a few tutorials that are specific to account keys. Many people jump into STEEM without understanding how to use their keys. Many don't even know that they have an Active key and a Posting key which means that they are solely using their Master key. I've seen a dolphin lose his master key. I've seen newbies lose their username all the time. They pop up on the help channel on steem.chat often.

The problem is that for people that just want to use STEEM as a social media platform are not familiar with how to store their keys or how to use them. This concept is a paradigm shift in login access and requires education.

I offer normal accounts as well as a trial period. The trial period requires the user to utilize the active key and posting key instead of the master key. I retain the master key during the trial period as a service to create new posting and active keys if the user loses them. After the trial period, I make the master key available. Then they can change all their keys and they will have full ownership and knowledge. The trial is for people that don't want to invest and just use the social media aspect of STEEM. For those that want to invest some capital, then the normal account is the best option.

These are just two options that I provide. I welcome others to do this even if it is time consuming. We need as many options possible available for new users to join.

All businesses on STEEM should be offering onboarding without question. Even if they don't have the RC to create accounts, they can most likely find someone to provide the accounts or use the account creation option for 3 STEEM using SteemConnect.