BuddyPress.org

They are currently using a gravatar replacement image. In the future these avatars will be more robust, but at the moment if you really dislike them you can change your theme to use whatever you’d like.

Because blogs can have more than 1 user/author, there’s no way to really know which user avatar to use for a blog. Blog avatars are coming, and maybe sooner than later, but for the moment there’s nothing in the 1.1.2 core that makes it immediately easy to replace the blog avatars, other than a custom theme of some kind.

You can create a custom home theme and replace the blog avatars with a default image of your own if you’d like. And choosing the creator is obvious to you, but might not be what someone else wants. The creator of the root blog is the admin account, but I always create a new user right away and use that new user as my active account.

When you first install WordPress and see the default theme, is your first response to say “it’s obvious the sidebar should be on the left side.” The default BuddyPress themes are designed to include all of the functions of BuddyPress to guide everyone into how to customize the use of them to do what you want and look how you want it to, just like the included WordPress themes do.

Sure, people have made ultra elaborate theme frameworks, but don’t expect that to come bundled in the BuddyPress core. You’ve got options if you don’t like what you see, so explore them.