Personally I don't see any objections to setting up restricted fora, something each may decide for its own. Also 'rpietila's' initiative regards to 'Top Contributors', which includes people of differentiated status. But I can understand your initial annoyance, as it reflects elitism. That's how society works though, birds of a feather flock together. Even Bitcoin can't change that.
Also can't blame them, as Bitcointalk is rather bloated with -let's moderately say- less intellectual posts.
It's just like the Bitcoin Freemasons. Whilst it is true that there are lots of idiotic posters on this forum I suspect that half of them already have their invites to Grandmaster Rpietila's Bitcoin Lodge. I suspect that the main criteria for entry into this 'exclusive' little club isn't a person's acumen or level of intelligence, but whether or not they fall into line with rpietila's own thinking and harmonise themselves with rpietila own whimsical outbursts.
But then this is all very much in keeping with Bitcoin as although it disguised itself as libertarian, it was always elitist from the start. Satoshi Nakamoto/NSA dev team get 12% of all Bitcoins of all Bitcoins currently in existence and price discovery of Bitcoin market ever since has been largely a game being played out between early adopter whales.
Bitcoin just takes the same old human greed and oneupmanship into a 21st century financial product/phenomena. It is only logical that elitist pseudo masonic groups start to emerge with a set of publicly stated noble virtues, yet whose operation in practice turns out to be more like a self-serving arse crawling race. This is how human's organise themselves, ambitious humans anyhow.
Question is, can rpetilia offer enough 'breadcrumbs' to make enough Bitcoiners believe that his arsehole is worth crawling up?