First why this thread is self-moderated?
Second, not only those members, but forum staffs can whitelist too.
You can complain here. If you have friends on the forum, you can ask them to report it here
You can make it easy by buying the Copper membership that includes whitelisting (automatically). With Copper membership, you will never be rejected and never have to complain anything.
With manual whitelisting, theymos expected majority requests will be rejected.
Only abused IP ranges have to pay a fee. The fee is an anti-abuse measure, and it is not meant to be (and isn't) much of a source of revenue.
If any very-veteran members want to volunteer, I can give you the ability to whitelist users. (All Staff can already whitelist users, as well.) Perhaps then someone could create a topic like "List of email addresses for people who can whitelist you for free", which I could link-to on the evil fee page. However, these IPs have evil for a reason. If it was sufficient for them to just solve a captcha or something, I'd have them do that. Before whitelisting someone, you have to do something to be pretty sure that they're not evading a ban and just going to get banned again. You may get the impression from complaints on the forum that everyone hits the fee and it's never warranted, but this is selection bias: the fee is more rare, and the vast majority of accounts that hit it should not be whitelisted.