Everybody in America knows that it's a bad idea to invest your retirement savings at the casino, and most people don't know that about arbitrary securities.
That would serve the goal of keeping the clueless from getting scammed, while also eliminating the kind of legalized classism (and I'd argue, unconstitutional on its face by way of the equal protection clause) that accreditation status represents.
I still feel like the "classism" argument here is extremely weak. Not because investment opportunities aren't classist --- they are --- but changing 501(a) isn't going to fix that. They're structurally classist. Good bets don't want retail money, because retail investors are, as a cohort, a bunch of loons. It might never occur to you to sue over some random, mundane options allocation event, but I promise you, it would occur to someone in the cohort of retail investors.
I really believe that retail investors do not have a functioning mental model of how startup investing works. It's hard enough to get people to diversify at all. To invest in startups, you have to place 10 bets, hoping that 1-2 winners pay for all the losers. Ordinary investors freak the fuck out when one of their positions goes to zero, which is the expected outcome in private company investment.
Another detail retail investors don't have: startup investors re-invest to keep pro-rate shares in future rounds. You have to keep feeding companies money to keep your share. Explain that to my Aunt Rita.
Another thing is, the LPs in VC funds aren't putting money in just because they think it'll be a super-successful investment that they want access to; some of them have portfolio allocation rules, and requirements to invest funds in things decorrelated from public markets. Which is just to say, a pension fund goes into these things with eyes wide open, unlike a skittish retail investor and his Lionel Hutzian legal advisors.