Is "Approval System" Steem's Achilles heel?

Steem has the potential to be the first highly adopted blockchain based publishing medium. I am not using the term social network because Steem has the potential to replace medium, Facebook and Quora at once.

When I first got to know about the platform I was excited about the potential of the platform and how it could be the flag bearer of applications built on blockchain. The same excitement also made it equally painful to wait for 5 days between account creation and approval.

I had to wait for 5 days after getting this mail

to get this mail

For a platform that is built on the concept of blockchain (fast, decentralised and transparent) I feel the current approval policy is exactly the opposite. It is slow, it is not decentralised and it is not at all transparent.

I think the steemit team should start addressing this on high priority. First write a public steemit post describing what is the current process of approvals and what is the current average waiting time. Second make it decentralised. Let the approved users vouch for new accounts created. To make sure that spam accounts are not created we can set restrictions like a new account needs to be approved by 3 other accounts, accounts approved before x days can only approve other accounts or only accounts with networth of more than x$ can approve other accounts and so on. This will naturally speed up the approval process. If we need to reduce the waiting time further for every approval users can be rewarded some steem.

I hope the team considers these and will not let the approval system to become Steems Achilles heel.