Thank You for posting, but I have to partially disagree, (for what I've seen), the more practical example is of me a friend helping another friend creating and configuring his steemit account, 2 or 3 days ago (yes I agree that there is a too long waiting period, there was an ~ 2 week wait until account verification) and as soon as he finished configuring everything, he started to post, upvote and followed other steemians, without any problem or warning about RC, no money had to be spent =X
Maybe something went wrong with some accounts, and I say this because You're not the first person that I see with this kind of problem.. Wish I could be of better help, the best advice I can give is to start slowly, a couple posts a day, some upvotes (5 to 10 is a good average), and continue from there until You have more RC to create posts more frequently, without that limitationAnyway, wish You the best and that this kind of problems get solved soon, for I do want to see more people participating..Cheers