Thanks for the thorough writeup! It's worth noting that the captcha will be back in the next version, but not exactly sure when it will be released.
They removed it during the switch from web sockets (which apparently took a lot of time and effort to keep updated), but someone submitted a pull request for a non-web socket version of the captcha code, which was accepted.
So hopefully we'll all be able to update to the new version soon.
Pfft - everyone knows you need a soul to get online