These restrictions just end up making a ton of garbage posts.
That's true, but garbage posts that can usually tell us if you are a bot or not.
Yes, but newbies should be allowed to contribute in someway that isn't just busy-work-ish. Maybe pay in LTC or BTC to get your account opened?
That's a good idea. I'm mainly against/annoyed by the restrictions because how newbies to the forums are treated as newbies to bitcoins. I think there's a lot of people who are very familiar with Bitcoin, and have even been lurking the forums for a long time, but just never posted anything. Now if they find something they want to post on, they have to get through these garbage posts and the time limit in order to contribute.