In the words of my friend who has only recently started playing Discovery:
"You don't have to follow an official faction's rules, but it's advised to unless you have a good roleplay reason for doing otherwise. You won't get sanctioned for not following them, but the faction has the right to punish you if you ignore them."
This is making mountains out of mole-hills. Nooblet, if you just linked your "RP" into a registration, I'm pretty sure they would register you right away. Not hard, right?
Neither is the whole registration thing. It's a lot more simple and painfree than people mark it out to be.