I did a complete rewrite of the Avatars Core Plugin to avoid using such a crazy amount of globals. Also, I’m not a fan of creating Classes just for the sake of avoiding names collision. So I moved everything into namespaced functions.
I am very open to critics for how I rewrote the plugin. My goal with this plugin is to show an example of good practices. You can see the file changes here (or just open the plugin locally and compare it with the original).
@anon66243189 - I fixed the bug you noticed for deafult avatars in Settings → Discussion. Regarding the default email… it’s currently set that way, I don’t really care about that right now but if you think we should change that email to something else I will do it, because you always provide good reasons. It’s just a mere replace inside the wp_install_defaults() function.
Now my next steps are: convert the plugin’s jQuery into Vanilla JS (already done), fix potential bugs that I didn’t notice (feel free to open an issue and I will get it fixed) and work on this suggestion (an option to autogenerate an SVG image with first letter in the user’s display name). (already done). I also created a Spanish translation to make sure internationalization is done right.