I think you're right that you shouldn't have to put in any special rep-farming effort (here or anywhere) to effectively get help with Ubuntu. Whatever features are available to users with only 1 rep, they should be sufficient for effectively getting help with Ubuntu problems. If that's not the case, then something is broken.
But in practice, it's not clear to me (from your description of things) how much of a problem there really is.
Pictures
You're right that it's annoying not to be able to post pictures. On the other hand, if anyone could make Ask Ubuntu display whatever picture they wanted, that would be a godsend to trolls and spammers, and it's very difficult to put automatic methods in place to examine the contents of a picture and decide if it's appropriate for our site.
I've grown somewhat skeptical of some of the new-user restrictions, over the years. But the restriction on posting pictures seems to make good sense. Did it really take copious amounts of time to post a picture externally and add a link to it? (Once the link is added, other users can edit the picture directly into your post, which has happened for your question.)
Comments
You can leave comments on your own question and on answers to your own question. If you have a problem with Ubuntu that is not addressed adequately by an existing answer, you should post a question (as you have done). You then benefit from the system's orientation toward making questions visible and attracting knowledgeable answerers.
If your question is related in some way to an existing question, you can include a link to the existing question in your question.
If you find you cannot comment on your own question or on answers to your question, then most likely you're signed in with an account other than the account you used to post the question. In this situation, assuming at least one of your accounts is registered, you can get any/all of your accounts merged by clicking the contact us link at the bottom of any page and explaining what you need. (If none of your accounts are registered, you can register an account and do this. In your case, however, your account appears registered.)
Tags
Since you can't create tags, just do the best you can with the tags that are available. It's easy for others to retag your post. Tagging shouldn't usually take more than, say, fifteen seconds of your time.
Remember, creating a new tag and applying it to your post means your post will be classified in a way that doesn't connect it to any other content. Furthermore, a new tag has no subscribers. Having to use the tags that are available prevents new users from spending inordinate amounts of time figuring out the "perfect" tags, and ensures that questions can get answered efficiently.
Meta
Anytime someone needs help with the site but can't post on meta, they can do what you've done. It's not perfect, but it's rather common for new users' posts about the site to be migrated from the main site to meta.
This doesn't give you the ability to post answers on meta, though, except to your own question. If you consider that to be a problem that's making the process of getting help with Ubuntu inefficient for you (or anyone), you may want to expand this meta question to explain that.
With that said, I'm not sure there really is any good reason to keep new users from posting on meta. This strikes me as a solution in search of a (theoretical) problem. I think it's especially important to view new-user restrictions with a critical eye, considering that at least one other one is purely a solution in search of a completely nonexistent problem (see below).
Other Restrictions
Interestingly, the new user restriction I'm most skeptical of, you have not mentioned at all.
Every Stack Exchange site except Skeptics.SE restricts new users from posting more than two hyperlinks per post. Since spammers only need one link to accomplish their nefarious spamming deeds, and since legitimate posts generally need more links than spam posts, this restriction is silly and pointless. Since the maximum number of links was increased to fifty on Skeptics (where it was particularly atrocious because of the nature of that site) and no problems resulted, it's already been demonstrated to be unnecessary. And yet we still have it.
The other three significant new user restrictions seem to be:
New users cannot answer protected questions. This is the purpose of protection, which should be used sparingly, and sometimes a question can be unprotected to facilitate an answer. Asking for a question to be unprotected, however, is sometimes difficult. Meta would often be an appropriate place for this, but very new users cannot post on meta. Do we really need any restriction on who can post on Meta, besides requiring a registered account? Hmm...
However, the inability to post an answer to a protected question doesn't stop anyone from asking a question or getting help.
New users cannot post as many questions or answers in a very short time as users who have gained a little bit of reputation. I've never heard anyone say this is a problem; I think it goes mostly unnoticed by the vast majority of new users.
Though not in the list, new users typically have to wait some amount of time between posting a question and posting their own answer. If the point of this is to prevent new users from posting things as answers that should be edits or comments... well, that happens a lot anyway and is very efficiently dealt with by flagging. So this restriction seems silly to me. (Maybe it's been lifted, while I was gone?)
