Here is my take on how the FAA could better address this situation. The registration should never have been created. It was/is a lie by the FAA. One thing the FAA wanted to do with the registration was to obtain people's emails addresses and push information to these people.
Trash the registration in its current form (it could be kept if wanted). Instead, in order to fly "safely", each person needs to review an awareness program once a year. For example, you could go online and review some safety information and perhaps take a short quiz at the end. The slight problem with this is that no one would know for sure that the person took the quiz until they caught them flying. But that is the case for the registration as well.
IMHO, the _real_ problem is that people just don't understand how to fly in a safe manner. I get that. The _problem_ is that no one has really pushed this information to people. Instead people need to read articles like this to understand what they should not be doing.