"Also, some people do scrap their galleries & start again."
"Like many others, I pulled my gallery in a dispute with the asinine TOS"

Yup, I've done that. 
Hurt sales though, so now I have a very limited gallery here. I keep a bigger one at another site. 

I never trusted the online script, allways seemed to high. Feels like an advertisting ploy.
Over the years watching who post and gallery post I get the feeling that there are usually about 5,000 active members (roughly) at any one time.

When ever we've asked this kind of question from the PTB the answer is allways evasive. "Thats propriety information".