IMO, I think there are good reasons for having this kind of throttling, but also situations where it would stand in the way of certain applications.

At 35K users, we're not yet seeing scale or any kind of high levels of noise and abuse. This could change rapidly in the 100-500K user range. I think this throttling is a smart, conservative way to begin to think about that.

On the other hand, it might prevent 3P apps from doing certain things which use the Steemit blockchain programmatically. Some applications could be cool, like integrating Steem commenting systems into external apps. However, compelling apps of this nature could also be supported directly.