silfiriel - 9:47 pm on Feb 19, 2013 (gmt 0)

this week I'm actually seeing an increase in image views.

I think the increase is just initial. I experienced it right after the launch of the new design, but I noticed that I am getting traffic from different keywords every day.
I am assuming googlebot is shuffling the results and changing images until it comes across a nice non-redirective result.
Just look at the search results for any keywords and you'll see that 99% of the image don;t use hotlink protection.

that is just my opinion, but honestly i don't want to wait and see my ranks dwindle down. I will wait for a month or two and see how things play out.

Also I think we waited too long, we should have organized and started redirecting right away to pron content in order to draw attention of people and media.