Not too sure about a lot of the details on that end but i understand how you feel about it... Especially with the changes to the image sizes.

yea hd art is now a subscription things...cause every damn site or service needs to be subscription based these days.........

Yeah. FA always had what.. a 10mb file size limit. It's bullshit that they locked RESOLUTION of all things behind a damn paywall. If anything FA+ members should have received a higher file size limit instead of taking what we had before and pay-walling them.

Gonna play devil's advocate here for the picture resolution...

...Have you seen Bandwidth costs?

Bandwidth isn't free. FA pays to connect to the internet to bandwidth providers/brokers to all around the world, even going through underground cables/satellites. Linus from Linus Media Group/LinusTechTips talked about YouTube going premium, and have talked about bandwidth costs, and both he and Luke would know, because of Floatplane.

Owning a website does require paying for bandwidth, and if you're on a popular website (like what FA is having), you need to pay for the bandwidth, where you're charged by the gigabyte, rounded up (i.e. 1.01GB gets rounded up to 2GB).

So, closing things like the Forum down where they don't have as many visitors use, and substitute a Discord makes sense. It offloads the bandwidth traffic to another company that is paying for said bandwidth, as far as the images are concerned.

Here's the LMG video where Linus an Luke talk about YouTube Premium and Floatplane, clipped from their Friday show: https://youtu.be/hjHB3vLxtG0?t=540

However resolution and file size are not locked together.
A 4k JPG image would be tiny when compared to a PNG file of the same resolution
Also there are ways to stuff image files with extra data to bloat the file size as well.
putting resolution limits behind a paywall does not make sense from a server hosting point of view.

Typical 3840 x 2160 (4k) JPEG image: ~20+MB
Typical 1920 x 1080 (1080p) JPEG image: ~5-7MB