Yes, this is due to a deeper problem that OSM, as a technology, missing the social aspects of our community. Accounts on this forum have a lot of features supporting the social part. Things like “you are a good contributor when 100 posts of yours get at least 2 upvotes”. The entire concept of not just this specific (random) example, but the entire generic idea of such statistics are missing in the OSM database.
As posted before, the idea is fleshed out more on How about limit new accounts?. So I won’t go into details. I’ve just posted about the fact that the problems we are seeing in mapathons can be solved by accepting that social mapping solves this already. So my hope is that the guys writing the code can be convined that what already works in real life can be reflected in software.
So, in short, adding restrictions like editing limitations is new territory for OSM and I hope people using the forums and people organizing mapathons can chime in into the direction that the limits can take. One set of limits was never going to work, adding the social ladder to it probably will make it work.