Higher post count for newbies until something is better thought out. Just allow the Newbie section to have two sections, maybe one tech side and the other currency.
I'm still well under 50 posts. I must have gotten whitelisted at some point. Anyway, post counts are a terrible metric to use to try to bring up the quality of a forum. It's just a mechanism to make sock puppet-creation painful.
If we want better, more substantive threads, we need some kind of regulation... stricter rules, subforums with strong enforcement of subject matter, mods carrying bigger hammers, that kind of thing. I don't know if all that effort would be worth it.