I've
whitelisted 26 users in 6 weeks. Two of them have earned a lot of Merit already, none of them have been banned yet. I can't possibly know if they're ban evaders, but I've rejected many times more requests than I've accepted.
In comparison, I haven't had as many requests due to the nature of the thread that you made, but I've whitelisted 0 currently. Although, I haven't been actively reviewing it every day as I decided it would probably be better to add a gap to see how serious the user is, I did catch up with a few requests, and most never got back to me at all. Probably looking for a quick solution. Unfortunately, my methods probably are a little too robust, but as theymos says most users that hit the fee are for valid reasons, and in my mind its up to them to convince me.