It's not the extra files sitting on the servers that are an issue, storage is cheap. It's the shear number of pageviews we're pushing out and the number of images that are on each page. I'd rather pony up for better hardware than limit page size though - I never want to make the content worse.
Also deleting talk pages etc doesn't actually make the database smaller, as mediawiki still saves all that so we can revert back to it if ever necessary. It would help readability of the talk pages though. The text database is actually relatively small - it's all the images that soak up the storage space.
Large PNGs do kill the pages however. They're slow to load and suck up a ton of bandwidth. The ironic thing about PNG is that at the same file size PNG is clearer than JPG with fewer compression artifacts... but the configuration to get that doesn't seem to be intuitive for people.
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