390cruise,
The problem with the PPRuNe forum setup is that you cannot upload pictures, you can only provide a link to pictures hosted at another location.
As someone who falls into your 'people who know lots about computers' category, I frequently cannot be bothered to follow the extra steps involved and don't bother uploading a picture when I occasionally would like to do so as an illustration to a reply.
However, looking at the other side of the coin, I can understand where they are coming from :
1/ Storage space costs money. With x number of members, the amount of storage space could soon rack up .... especially with the less computer literate members uploading photos that are not optimised.
2/ Bandwidth costs money. Through the link route, your browser will send a seperate request to retrieve an image from a different location. If images were to be hosted on PPRuNe servers, then the additional bandwidth requirements would need to be met by PPRuNe rather than 3rd party servers.
3/ I guess there may possibly some attempt to avoid legal liabilities by not hosting the photos themselves.
So there you go, a catch 22.