Thanks.
He's absolutely right on the cat/mouse aspect, regarding it's not a mistake to limit requests from bitcointalk to imgur.
On the one hand, maybe. On the other hand, the problem is in part caused by internal site software that rewrites peoples' image links and there is a huge amount of money in the pot from people who donated to improve the site.
It shouldn't be up to a user to implement an image upload site to fix things out of their own pocket.
(Note that I do agree mostly with the reasoning behind the proxy).