I don't think I've joined many websites or forums before that didn't require email verification and if captchas are so pointless then why does pretty much every other forum use them? They have their benefits and will stop some bots at least.
I've been doing a lot of antibot work recently and I'm not saying it is pointless because you want to put as many obstacles in the way as possible. I'm just trying to reduce any expectation that either of these will make a difference. Email verification just requires them to run an email server and a script to create the email accounts at the same time as the forum account and then acknowledge the link sent. You can buy software to solve reCAPTCHA for less than $100 a year subscription and the botnets I deal with have written their own solvers.