i think if we decide to remove all critical comments in the galleries then it will very sadly send a negative message to the rest of the community.  not only would it undercut the value of the critiques by sending them to a dark corner of the community, not only would it not induce similar behavior as Tissaia and others have mentioned, but it would send the message that the gallery is an inappropriate place for critical comments.  i say dark because i see months worth of  "post this month's images here for critique" in the art theory forum, and just about 0 activity outside of ours.

personally, i think we should each do what's most comfortable.  and see what happens.  we have a forum now, but i'd like to see how activity is in a few months when this isn't so new and the big push has stopped.  after all, the forum isn't new, but until this method of critique was in place, it wasn't happening. conversely, if i ever complete a picture, i don't want to rely on links to threads which will change the next time the system changes just to re-read comments.  but i think that people who want to discuss critiques should be free to, people who want to get feedback before posting an image should be free to, and people who want to post to the w.i.p. gallery should be free to.

Rutra - you want to leave the comments but keep the picture?  but won't the comments be meaningless without the picture?  well, you could do that by starting a thread with a link to the picture, then updating the image and starting a new thread when it was finished.  then you would have two threads of critiques and one image.  would that do what you want?