I am not sure I understand that. You mean members who are not upgraded need to feel that their membership is just as good as an upgraded member?
Let me explain a few things that have been emphasized elsewhere, but probably needs mentioning here in general:
When we first started this community we did not have any kind of donation system, but we also had a lot of server trouble, so we decided to put out some money and make it worthwhile. There are members here who donated a lot of money towards this long before there was even FP or 'features'. We decided that it would be a good idea to have these members receive some kind of elevated status for this and so we started adding features - that is how all of this started, but the foundation (and still is...) of this Community is Intellectually Mature Discussion, thus if someone joins and only post constructively then that is all they need to do and unless they venture into the 'extra' pages will they realize that upgrading is a factor. In fact we have many members on here like that, they come post in the topics that interest them and leave. Emphasis on added features do not bother them because they are not here for that.
Why emphasis on upgrading on 'extra'? The main reason for this is because users sometimes do not understand value, time and money. An example of this: I used to have it where all users could play all the RPGs at the same time for free, but then they started to play in one RPG and skip the other, or the would make us create a character for them and not show up - so RPG status came in to cut this back. Donating members help us to know who is serious and who is not. Who we should listen to and whom we should just take into consideration as far as extra features go.
Now the reason for this thread was to
find out why a 'new' member would think they have to pay since in all the registration / guest pages emphasizes that the site is FREE, but as we ascertained before most users head for the 'extra' features first, because they are not really here for intellectual discussion. My personal feeling is that most of these are teens. Save for Smudge and one or two others it is a rare thing to have a young
teen become a serious poster here - you can tell by their intro thread (which also has been setup to detect this).