1) The purpose of the hack is not to reduce the size of the database, but to dramatically reduce the number of queries required to display a page showing avatars.
It's much easier to simply show an image using the webserver than to have PHP query the database and grab the avatar from there.
2) Not sure about that... it should still store the filename
3) Because storing the avatar revision in the customavatar table would mean that the custom avatar table would still need to be queried = bad.
4) Um... not sure what you are trying to do here...
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