Image display. What is Best?

I have been wondering all these years why RW has the image & site image plug-ins when one can just simply drop a photo into any column field without them? I cannot see any difference between the 3 options….

Does anyone else see something that I don’t or maybe know why we got these facilities?

May I add a sample of various options:

I skipped the Nick Cates PHOTO option though that might perhaps be the most flexible option. However, it seems quite time consuming.

I need to display plenty of VERY CLEAR images using as little file size as possible. The image must also be zoomable. If possible, there should be an option to add a visible caption

I just cannot find the right solution for this.