For sure, you totally hit the nail on the head - the solution presented for svbtle is not an optimal choice for a production, user-facing web application.
I find this jarring. Web development is all about bending over backwards for the different systems in place. Here we have an article on how they achieved a nice minimal process for uploading images for a closed system nobody will be able to use (to protect the image they're not releasing the system yet aren't they?).