The intention was not to make it difficult for people to access the forum, part of it was to create a forum moderation whereby not anyhow person trolling around the internet could possibly join the forum, it's a little restriction that was aimed to reduce numbers of spammers from specific regions believed to have abused some opportunity like this, if you're truly interested on bitcointalk and you finds out you can't access the registration, your interest and commitment to joining will help you finds a means of joining either by paying the little amount for evil fee or by getting whitelisted if requested, now you could see that they have made provisioned for free registration otherwise, as long as you can contact an email for whitelisting.