Hi Ernie,
you make a salient point. Back in the day when I was starting out in this business photographers in London, where I began my career, would have 15-20 images in their portfolios. More was considered too much. I started out with 11. 
What I have wanted for years in an image gallery and finally have since just a few months in Juicebox, is a random sort-order (on load) with the ability to ‘fix’ some images so that they always appear, not matter what the random sort produces. For return visits, which I get quite a lot of (often when people are thinking of booking me) it keeps it fresh.
But these days, why limit the number? If people want to keep looking, why not let them? To this end, the usual ‘line’ of thumbnails is no longer up to it. It’s slow. People go faster these days.
The Tumblie thumbnails work fairly well in this respect, although I’d like to have more control over the layout. Once zoomed in to an image, the layout of buttons is baffling at best and limited in its options. The new Photoswipe is nice in this respect. You can see my Thumblie test here:
http://www.grantsymon.com/test/testthumblie.html
The really big deal for me with Exhibeo-2, was bringing everything into FW. I wanted a modern responsive gallery, which is easy for me to implement and maintain and all from within FW.
I would have thought that Exhibeo would be a really obvious thing for Softpress to build and sell, almost as a ‘loss leader’ because it would be a teaser that could persuade a lot of people using image galleries to use FW to build their sites, since the whole thing could be easy for them to do.
If Softpress were to offer a few really nice photography driven FW templates + Exhibeo … boom, the most practised hobby in the world is a huge market. Gigantic. Which is why there are so many companies offering these template driven sites. It’s a big money market, which Softpress have simply never entered and yet it would be a great fit for them, because FW can be endlessly customised, unlike 99 percent of these template sites. There’s a tipping point of ease-of-use for these things and at the moment, FW is only for the brave in the context of this market and currently, not even on the radar. Offering a few templates + Exhibeo could be very compelling for the tens of thousands of photographers looking for web-site-gallery solutions. This isn’t a passing ‘fad’ of a market. It’s long-term.
Having understood that Softpress aren’t actually making the Exhibeo templates, but instead finding some rights-free ones they can use, it all falls into place. (What have they been doing for the last 6 months?!). What a missed opportunity!
Of course this explains why these templates are only ‘adequate’ and have so little versatility and have so few features. The penny drops. How can you sell a great product if you’re just repackaging someone else’s? I have now discovered that I can use JAlbum to build a Photoswipe gallery … and guess what … it has ‘click to open - click to close’. 
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