Potential greylist or whitelist?

I have been talking with the founder of a server called Kingdoms of Aeonis which encourages strict role-play similar to ours, and he has advised us to implement a whitelist on the server. His server has had a whitelist since June 11th, and since then they have gathered more than 40 pages of applicants on Minecraft Forums. The founder, FireFlower, suggests a whitelist because "quality is better than quantity". Thedoomed, another member of his server believes the same thing. He says that "it's elitist and horrible [against] the people who just want to join for fun, but we only want the people who can be mature and actually serious about role play". I agree with both FireFlower and Thedoomed, because whitelisting does allow for a simple weeding-out of the bad players. In essence, it's a sieve or a colander—all the unwanted impurities simply slide down the drain, and the good and healthy product remains in the bowl. Yet while a whitelist may be a solution, I am leaning more towards a greylist. For those of you who don't know what a greylist is, it's a system similar to whitelisting where a player must apply to gain full access to the server. However, it also allows for a player to have limited access the server so they can get a feel for it before saying yea or nay. This means that players can check out the server beforehand, and then have the option to apply if they like it. I favor this option more because, as a Minecrafter myself, I don't want to take the time to apply for a server that sounds cool, only to find out that the server whose application I spent 15 minutes of my day on is actually crap. So the question is this: greylist, whitelist, or neither? Post your thoughts below.