I don't entirely blame them, there's literally no money in direct image hosting for free, but it's getting harder and harder to upload an image, then get a direct link that will work in all situations.

In many cases they look at the referrer and redirect a direct link, and they make it harder and harder to get direct links (first by having the UI show the "full page" link by default, by making the image link to the full page so if you right-click and select "copy image address" it sends you to the "full page", then they moved everything into "albums" which meant it's even harder to link to a single image, and in many cases if you try to right-click and select "copy image address" you get a data URI.