Simply sign up on the Mailgun website (the pay-as-you-go plan is a bit hidden), retrieve your Mailgun API keys, click on the “Edit” button in your Ghost Mailgun settings you see on your screenshot, and you’re good to go.
It seems unreasonable to me to use a mailgun and force it. Not everyone has thousands of users. We want to be able to scale this and force this choice rather than leaving it to the user.
It is up to the user. If you don’t want to use Mailgun, then don’t. If you want to change the fact that Mailgun is the only mail provider natively supported by Ghost, you can contribute to the development of Ghost.
There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides.