Why are the avatars so difficult?
Because I want to stay away from actually syncing all users to the main site as it will triple our database size and will result in a significant decrease in speed and performance.
The alternative that makes the most sense is to have the users stay in the ddf database.
For the avatars to display nicely on ddms, we would need to crop and optimize them on the fly which again would impact performance.
Theoretically we could just crop all avatars on DDF, but some of you may not like the result :-)