If the coin had a few shops open. Or a few other programs to earn from. This might make sense (if we could find a way to accept new people still). But if this were implemented now, Devcoin would die.
Some sort of new user procedure could be introduced like offering them to write up to x amount of shares per round for x amount of rounds before the training wheels are off and they graduate to normal user.
Also some sort of quality metric needs to be implemented such that higher quality material gets graded accordingly and paid accordingly. Should be an absolute grading mechanism and not with respect to what was written during that round etc.
That could work, then new people could still come in.
And they (Mark I think) were talking about something like articles that are tagged as superior somehow, and somehow rewarding the writers for these articles. Not sure what the plan is yet though.