My friend Snaike,
For once (maybe I think a second time, but I can't remember the first) I will have to disagree somewhat with your analysis of WGTs motives. I would think that any potential sponsor or (god forbid) takeover prospect, would be intelligent enough to look at stats like "active users" rather than "total users" or daily/weekly/monthly site hits, and average #of rounds played per user, average amount of credits bought per user...etc. Total user base is really the most useless statistic available and I would give anyone the benefit of the doubt that they understand that.
Having said all of that you did slightly touch on a possible reason that more action is not taken, the money aspect. Players who create another account because they can't compete at the upper levels that they have attained, will transfer their monies to another account (via equipment purchases or MPC loss) for the soul purpose of scamming innocents who are just starting out out of their bought credits. This either leads the innocents to buy more credits, or wise up and stop wagering or leave all together. This is bad in any scenario because it will lead to a drop of potential revenue. Now there is also another aspect as well, WGT takes a portion of every wager, be it MPC RGs or Premium Weeklies and pockets it, to have these players constantly keeping credits moving around in this manner is only beneficial for the bottom line.... although in the short term only!!
Now don't get me wrong, I don't believe that WGT is letting this slide on purpose for some dark purely greedy motives. I believe it is a much harder issue to deal with than what the general public believes, and that WGT would benefit more in the long term with a viable solution... But what kind of restrictions can you place on new accounts being created....
One account per IP address? Won't work, multiple members of families legitimately playing, multiple users on internal networks that are gated by a single IP to the outside world. Also dynamically changing IPs from ISPs.
Credit Card Verification? I've suggested this, but it is rather limiting as some people don't like to give out that type of information if they don't really need to.... (just ask Sony how that worked out for them) not to mention not all potential users have credit cards....
Monitoring transactions between users? All purely circumstantial and would not provide any solid proof of wrong-doing.... not to mention being a beastly task to undertake!!
Mail in account application? Sha' right.... let kill some trees to play E-Golf... :^)
And then there is the current restriction.... one account per email address.... how many different email addresses do you have?
As far as all the idle accounts just sitting there searchable.... I'd rather them spend the time developing new features and courses than sifting through the millions of user IDs and figuring out if particular accounts can stay or be deleted.
So yeah... to the OP this is the largest issue plaguing this site, and is a turn off to many users (not only newbs) but it may not be as easy as you think to come up with a solution for, after all it is still innocent until PROVEN guilty, right?
My 2 cents, Play ON! (and have fun)