But you see how locking people out of risk locks them out of reward right? The interface to regulate should be on the educational front, not on the access front. Instead the regulatory framework we have leads to the accredited class being protected from competition and is a direct antecedent to the neo gilded age landscape we are in now. IMO the want for regulation that "protects" investors on the margin while hurting the majority by locking them out of risk is the wrong approach, and always has been.

In theory, it locks people out of reward.

In practice, it locks them out of scams.

It is horrendously irresponsible to enable practices that we can predict will, with very high probability, result in significantly greater ability for predatory and unscrupulous actors to take advantage of the public, especially if the purpose is merely to allow the wealthy—and it is only the wealthy who can genuinely take advantage of such things; the rest of us simply can't afford to take those risks—to try their hand at high-stakes gambling.

The current outcome is a mistake, no one specific law, but perpetuated by fear that paycheck to paycheck people will get scammed

It is an overfitted system that has created more and more compliance in response to rare scams that occurred within the rules of their system anyway! If companies didnt find it too expensive to go public earlier nobody would be trying to have this conversation. People wouldnt be getting ripped off in massive SPAC deals because the target companies would be public already.