I agree. Requiring memberships, and submitting events for USCF rating, is a barrier (a barrier you’ve already run up against) to participation with no real counter-balancing benefit. Build the local community around non-rated events (run to USCF standards - BTW, this helps train TDs too).
When enough players show enough interest in USCF ratings, then ADD a premier event for USCF members only.
In the meantime, use WinTD to compute “local ratings” and to maintain a private database of players - it’s very good at this. If you have players with USCF ratings, you might want to periodically set their local ratings to correspond with their USCF ratings (say, once per year). Or not.
USCF ratings only become useful and reliable when you have a significant number of players traveling to regional/national USCF-rated events. Ratings calculated within your closed pool are not very meaningful (it doesn’t matter if you compute them using WinTD or if USCF computes them - you NEED some sort of connection to the national pool to align your local scale with the national one). So, UNTIL YOU HAVE ENOUGH players who have acquired USCF ratings elsewhere, there’s very little point in jumping through all the hoops to make your local ratings actual USCF ratings. When you do have enough players (enough that about half the entries in your premier, USCF-rated event already have USCF ratings), then you are ready to hold the occasional USCF event.
Remember that your “local” events can be run to the same standards (same rules, same prizes) whether you require USCF membership and rate the games, or not. Running your beginners’ events as UNrated (by USCF) means that you get a lot more flexibility with regards to rules and regulations that may not be important to your beginners.
USCF really does not need (and probably takes a loss on) players who sign up for 1 or 2 events and then never play again. Allow those players to live (and die) in your local, unrated, unsanctioned events.
I have a standard offer to direct events for free, for start-up organizers in my area. I routinely advise them to run their events as UNrated for the first year or three. We do everything “by the book” except for collecting memberships and submitting rating reports. Usually, by the third year, I try to ease myself out of that particular gig - because the neophyte organizer is now competent to TD the event, and they have started to make money. The most common way for me to ease myself out is to tell the organizer what my ordinary and customary fee is for a paid TD job. That usually motivates them to send in the Local TD form and start directing for themselves. Occasionally, I run across an organizer who discovers that they don’t really want to run events to USCF standards - again, I can ease out of their events by pointing out that they are now fully competent to run a non-rated non-USCF event all by themselves (without the hassle of dealing with all those pesky “rules” that I insist on when I run the event).
Give your local players/schools/etc. a chance to find out what kind of event they really want to run. It’s much better to have a LOT of players playing in un-rated events than it is to have NO ONE playing because the USCF rules don’t fit the local situation.