Personally, I'd prefer to see 'likes' or something similar added as one of the Jr. VIP criteria.
As things stand today, the only qualification to post a marketplace thread is making 100 posts that don't get caught by the mods. It doesn't matter if these posts are 100 basic questions like 'what is a backlink', 100 times repeating someone else's answer on a week-old thread, 100 times asking for freebies and samples, 100 posts welcoming others, and so on. I won't call out anyone specifically, but there are a few new sellers whose post counts are far below 100 if you exclude the welcome posts and freebie/sample begging.
If someone can bring value through a marketplace thread, they should be able to give enough good advice to earn more than five likes out of three hundred posts. And when someone goes from knowing nothing about SEO to selling SEO services in 60 days, that should be a red flag about the real quality of their services.
One of the benefits of being a Jr VIP is that you can open a BST, but it is not the only reason to sign up. That is where our attitudes differ.
To be fair, anyone can share information regardless of their membership level, and their status in the free/paid/invitation membership groups has no inherent bearing on the information itself or how it affects others. Raising the price won't necessarily raise the quality of the threads, or number of high-quality threads, it'll just mean the fluff threads are posted by regular members instead of Jr. VIPs.
Marketplace threads, on the other hand, do have a very direct impact on those who take part in the deal, and in turn an impact on the reputation of BHW itself. And in my opinion, making 100 low-content posts should not be the sole qualification for a staff-approved marketplace thread.