Once again, Stilly, these BS threads do not use any more bandwidth than any other BS threads do (e.g., joke threads, political discussions, obit threads for non-musical people, etc.). The only extra bandwidth that's being used is on the sites we link to for the pictures -- and those sites seem to thrive on hits. : )
If the pics were in the same thread it would be virtually impossible to tell which caption was supposed to be for which picture.
There are hundreds of threads here - BS and otherwise - that I never open up. I'm sure that's true for a most other Mudcatters too. There's no reason people who don't enjoy the caption threads to bother clicking on them.