It's sad that you have to do useless posts before being able to post anywhere else.
Agree on this, however, forum administrators must have implemented these restrictions for a reason.
Well, to be honest, I think the idea is not for the newbies to make useless posts, but to actually contribute. Unfortunately, there's so many that no admin could possibly be bothered to value posts, so an automated system it is - which obviously means people will just post "Hi!" "omg!" "me too!" posts in order to satisfy that part of the requirement.
All in all, I would agree that the posts limit may as well be dropped - but the time-on-forum cap still keeps out most ne'er-do-goods... plenty slip by or later turn into ones, of course
