I'm considering switching over half of my meager stack of BTC to Steem to power up so I would be able to do this but am not sure of the incentive to do so.

So basically by having enough SP, instead of using Steem to create an account, you can use RCs to claim instead? Am I understanding this right?

I need to find an article with it broken down Barney style because it's not entirely clear to me. I'll probably need to revisit your article once I get a better idea.