It's also a philosophical thing that's changed over the years. When we first set up the forums, there wasn't even a question because many people were still on dialup internet. It wasn't until years later that forum avatars became common, and by then, we'd already established our cool ranking system. As much as I like the ranks (and they still exist today in text form under your name), newcomers were constantly confused about how to set an avatar because it's a universal feature everywhere else today. As our fancy new forum gets more established and people set their own custom avatars, the generic placeholder images will also become less of an issue.