For example, when I first joined I may have though Gypsy had almost no art talent at all if it werent for being able to back-track through her thread
There will soon be a thing which automatically displays gallery images for a specific username, essentially creating member galleries, and fulfilling the function of the artist threads.
IMO, 1 thread each is a terrible way of indexing the material because you've got to click through loads of comments and crap before you can get the actual images. We originally set the art corner forums up as a compromise - the old MSN forums had a gallery, but when we originally moved to vB + domain, there was not a suitable gallery system to replace the old one. Thus we went for threads. Now, however, we have (what I think) is a better way of organising the information.
isnt it better on site resources to limit people to 1 thread each?
Practically no effect on system resources whatsoever. The only thing I'm worried about is the database size getting bigger and bigger as people upload more and more images. But hey, that already happened anyway. The 'bishies' thread, etc.
Thanks for the support anyway guys.