@Ghanima No doubt it has been discussed much before. A lot of policies like this I think come out of Stack Overflow, where they might make more sense because of the volume. Here, allowing new users to make comments would solve more problems than it would create. Unfortunately though, fundamental stuff like that has been argued about to death already and the consensus is unlikely to change.

Very unlikely indeed. Which makes your approach to not unnecessarily penalize the newcomers even more worthwhile.