As far as the image hosting, you are right. Storing the images themselves on the Steem blockchain is probably not the way to go. The suggestion I made was to integrate with a third party site (like https://www.steemimg.com/), although there would be a few other options as far as this goes. It would be a realistic expectation for users to want their images to be stored forever and be uncensorable too - which would be a bigger project.

Attaching a price tag to images is a great idea. I am going to add that one to the list tonight!

I know it was a shitton of work

Yes! It is good that people other than the developers recognize this, hehe. Some in the community have fairly high expectations of what develoers can crank out in a short amount of time :) This is by no means meant to be an overnight project, but more a community formed roadmap for where we want to see things head over the next several years.

I've heard rumors that the profile page and badges are in the works to some extent. Hive account@ned mentioned both in a recent interview, which means they are at least thinking of them. I believe there is a way to do this already using the "meta data" property in the block-chain, although they may decide to introduce some additional support for this as part of one of the upcomming hard-forks. We'll have to wait and see what they come up with.