Will, thanks for your engaging read once again.
For including images in your posts try this – it’s not perfect by any means but you might think it’s better than nothing.
Go to edit and select the ‘Text’ tab rather than the ‘Visual’ tab. On the tool bar in this mode is a button called ‘IMG’. Click here and you can enter a URL for an image. How you load images that don’t have a URL? No idea. After you’ve loaded it go back to the ‘Visual’ tab and click on the image – you can re-size, add a caption etc. I couldn’t get gifs to work but flat images were OK. You get an annoying strip of text next to the image after you’ve submitted the post – if you you work out how to get rid of this I’d love to know! Good luck, hope this works for you 🙂