As someone who still remembers well how ogs used to be when players were allowed to choose their own starting rank…
It made both dan-ranks and the lowest kyus into a total mess.
Back then ogs had 3 kinds of dan-level players: 1) total beginners who didnt yet know how go-ranks work and (correctly) assumed that they should be the end of the rating scale, and for everyone familiar with metric-system 6d looks lot smaller than 30k. 2) users who deliberately chose dan-rank in order to boost their own ego or appear stronger in chat, or to get teaching games with real dans, or just for the fun of it. 3) actual dans, whom were small minority between the other two groups.
Basically any time you saw “high-dan” game being played on ogs neither of players knew how to make two eyes. And back then “how we can get more strong players to join ogs” was one of the main questions pondered on the chat and forums.
And on the other end it made the lowest 30k rank a real dungeon, and lot worse than the “forever 25k” problem which was somewhat fixed by rating update in this january. It doesn’t matter what is the lowest available option, there are always a lot of players who think “i’m gonna start from the bottom and see how high can i climb”. Its quite natural for people to challenge themselves like that, and go players in general are people who like challenges. The downside of this was of course that real beginners were stuck at 30k for very long time without any realistic hope of reaching 29k.
This was the ogs rank distribution when user were allowed to choose their starting rank between 30k and 6d…
I’m afraid the same thing would happen again with the lowest available option for starting rank…