> I don't feel I should need to spend $200/year (plus $25 more for flickr), so that I can organize and maintain a photo hobby
At a generous 5 MB per photo, that's 24,000 photos. You would have to take 65 photos, every day, for a year straight to reach those numbers. That's 1 photo every 15 minutes of your waking life for a year (assuming 8 hours sleep).
That's considerably a bit more than a 'hobby'.
At your levels, I consider $200/year rather reasonable for that level of obsession. The amount a traditional film camera user would have had to spend in developing and film costs alone for that level of usage would be astronomical.
The only quasi-reasonable complaint there is the long term storage costs of your high level of need. However, you're also making a special case of needing those photos 'everywhere'. Comparing to traditional photography there would have been no way to lug around 24,000 photos. They would have been stored, with the negatives, in an album somewhere. Kind of like sitting on a harddrive - which the going rate for 120GB is $25 (250 GB external for $50) as a one-time purchase cost.
I understand your desire to have everything digital available at all times and backed up against disasters, but there is going to be a cost associated with that.
And that cost is MASSIVELY cheaper, even at today's rates, than someone with your 'hobby' would have been spending trying to do the same thing, 10-15 years ago.