If you think that this place is only about dishing, perhaps it's because you haven't ventured into the other topics? There's a lot of discussion going on elsewhere, and people do spend some time dishing in the various off topic threads because it's been verbotten for so long...
It seemed to me that the questions were reasonable, and since you ARE rudi's point person for north america, you're the right person to ask, right? When you post pictures for comments, it seems reasonable to get comments...even negative ones.