I had offered these links in the anticipation that they would be taken as sufficient evidence that newbies are in fact obliged to read the entire sequences before commenting

I think you're using "obliged" to mean encouraged/pushed, and Alicorn is using it to mean required-before-being useful. The former is accurate, but to a variable degree; the latter, as she demonstrated, is not.

I had imagined that newbies are turned off by an apparent social pressure to have read the sequences

Yes. and being restricted to a newbie-only (i.e. devoid of useful content!) area until we could prove we had done so would not be less of a turnoff. :P