@smooth:

Verification, in general, is an onboarding killer.

Agreed.

I'm not diminishing your point, but I do want to note that if the users can choose to verify later at their time of choosing, it doesn't kill onboarding. Yet the new problem becomes why are they motivated to verify then if there is no urgency?

Btw, I had already thought of this. I will be making a new top-level comment soon to explain the disadvantages of my proposal discussed already and why I already know that we really can't fix Steem for as long as the model is voting to distribute from a pool of debasement.