We didn't used to have CAPTCHA or other more intrusive security settings enabled, but we've been getting DDOSed and spammed a lot the past year, as our site continues to grow, and it became necessary to enable these security features for the time being. Several of our forum sections were being spammed by bots for weeks at a time, and as you can tell, CAPTCHA has prevented that. Apologies for the inconvenience, but your ire should instead be directed at those that force those features into use. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to relax things over time.