The other night when I watched the video that caused all this I was very scared of the direction Steemit could be going. It felt like it was heading towards a cult where you have to pay to join and with Jerry's amazing marketing I worried about this scaring off many people from joining this community.
It does however bring up a good point about the difficulties with signing up. I hope this can be fixed soon.
Maybe some sort of invite system could work where each user can invite 10 other new users and maybe be like a patron to get them started. This may also help with the amount of spammy users joining. This seems to work on other sites and helps to keep the quality up.
Jerry's enthusiasm seems to get the better of him sometimes and I hope he can put it behind him. I'm not a big fan but I think he brings lots of good to the community, especially new users.
Just my two cents.