Good advice KK
I followed pretty much the same road as you - starting with free sites and AVS sites and not bothering with gallery pages. To be honest with you, I still don't see how building galleries is worth the time (for me anyway). When I have, I've gotten a ton of traffic but it converts for shit... not even worth the bandwidth.
But (obviously) some people out there are making good money building galleries. More power to 'em...
TB