With a total of 17 SP, I'm now able to create around 20 comments every five days. I think this is sufficient for a new user. I can upvote a lot of posts, write a few comments, do a few transactions, all without worrying about my RC usage. When you only have 3 SP, it becomes a lot harder to interact with the blockchain, but not impossible.

If you write good, original content, you don't need more than a few posts a week to get some upvotes. You can do this with any SP, even if you just joined the platform. Before HF20, I wouldn't ever run out of bandwidth and I could post hundreds of comments per day. That doesn't improve the quality of those posts.

I think that the new RC system will encourage newcomers to write fewer posts of higher quality, which will increase the average quality of the posts on Steem substantially. That will hopefully cause a significant increase in the popularity of the Steem blockchain, which in turn causes that the number of new posts per day remains stable. The only difference will be in the quality of each post.