The article has it right, though, about Flickr's lack of updates. The most recent major change I've noticed was a year or two ago and, IMHO, it made the site worse.
Absolutely agree. I'm a hobbyist travel photographer, so I end up with essentially two kinds of photos: photos of a place, where I try and form a nice composition, post process (crop, colors, balance, etc.) and then carefully catalog on flickr (for the former, I might take 20,000 photos during a week, and end up with a couple dozen really choice ones I want to keep in this way), and cheesy photos of me and my family at these places, mostly goofing off with statues or whatever.
The semantics of the two kinds of photos couldn't be different. So I use FB and G+ for the latter, and flickr most definitely for my carefully curated former.
I'm not sure I can replicate that in g+.
Also, the average DSLR has a shutter life expectancy of around 100000-150000 cycles. I doubt you're replacing your camera body every 5 trips.
When taking a picture has almost no cost, people take many pictures of the same thing and sort out the best of the bunch later.
I usually shoot more like 10,000-15,000 in a week, but I've gone closer to 20,000 in a couple cases. It's only 1500 photos a day for a 10,000 shot week. Which averages just a bit over 1 a minute for an 8 hour day (but who says I only spend 8 hours out and about?) but in truth, the shot times are more clumpy. For example, I shot about 30 photos in 2 minutes of Vasari's fresco inside the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). I'll probably combine all those into one or two larger photos stitched up.
Differently, walking up to the same Basilica along a street in Florence offered several very different compositions of the same street. In 5 minutes I was able to shoot 20 pretty decent shots, and probably 1 or 2 really good ones.
That's 50 shots of the same building in a total of 7 minutes.
Riding on local public transport often gives you views of lots of neat things, and only one or two seconds to shoot them.
I'm not even counting the family photos I also took in the meantime.
And yes, I'll actually probably start looking for a replacement camera body sometime next year. I shoot with a D60, so it's only about $400-450...trivial compared to the cost of 5 or 6 2- week trips overseas.
My wife used to think I was crazy, but now years later, going over these old photo archives, we can remember in fantastic detail many of the great places we've traveled together.
About the 1st point: totally agree. I use flickr to look for a good pictures and from time to time to post some of mine that are reasonably OK - for me it's not, and never has been, a site to post photos from last night's bash or socialize with people, that's what Facebook is for (and maybe G+ will be someday in the future (but it won't come easy for them)). I also don't need the site to change every 6 months - if it works OK (and flickr works OK for me) then changing it is not really necessary (or at least, not that important).