Right, the only sure way to get on the ballot here, is for you (or your party) to have received a certain percentage of the vote in the previous election. But since we aren’t allowed to write in candidates on our ballots; it means to effectively get on the ballot, you (or your party) must have already been on the ballot. When I was an mover and shaker in the local Libetarian party (I’m a recovered Libertarian); almost 100% of our resources were expended in trying to just get on the ballot. The status quo has been frozen into place, essentially by law.
As I’ve said before, it is eerily similar to the old Jim Crow laws organized to prevent black people and immigrants from voting. They passed laws making it extremely expensive to register/vote; then made an exceptions if your grandfather had been registered to vote. Ensuring that people of African descent will be blocked from voting; their predecessors were slaves and couldn’t register to vote so they were typically forced to pay enormous sums to vote. Caucasians typically didn’t have this problem.
Our system is being heavily gamed; and it has been that way long before any of us were even born. So much so that I blush when people refer to the US as a democracy or republic. Perhaps on paper; in practice it is neither.