Hm, that's a very valid point.

It seems that Steemit Inc. also added some code for future account creation through mining, which could be activated with a soft-fork.

In the HF20 post, they mentioned that the problem of creating an account without any second party would be the missing customisation of the recovery account. Mined accounts should have the ability to add a custom recovery account after the account is created.

So maybe creating an account without any 2nd party isn't so long away, after all?