Maybe you think or see a ton of threads I miss where legit users are in need of this feature. Feel free to point them out. The point of this topic was not to dismiss the idea, but bring the discussion centered around this point to one place for review and discussion. Who's to say getting whitelisted wouldn't be a painless process, is the unknown of how the system rolls out enough reason to discredit it before it's trialed?
I was a newbie when I tried to sell my gift cards and mostly all users who posted on the thread derailed my thread and asked me to sell my genuine gift cards at a huge discount as they were getting carded gift cards for that rate. To stop all these unnecessary demotivating comments, I made all my threads self-moderated ones. Example:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=928753.5Whitelisting is just giving privilege to one user and not to the other which is unfair. One forum had such feature for premium members and it was highly unfair to others who have not established themselves on a forum.
They do remove off-topic. Most are also smart enough to distinguish when someone is only attempting to appear on-topic.
None of the comments I reported in my thread were considered off-topic and hence not removed. They troll you to an extent that you feel like giving your product for free. The self-moderated feature is a blessing in disguise for me.