For accuracy's sake, I'm going to correct what you said about this being the first Lollipop ROM. It was not. SkyDragon was the first, and all of the others (including this one) were based off of it. At this point, though, we've gotten the official OTA, on which this is now based.
I meant for the Verizon variant. The original SkyDragon GPE ROM for Lollipop was GSM only. I meant that this thread was for the first Lollipop ROM for us.
As to the talk of whether I meant the web based forum or the XDA/Tapatalk app, I actually was referring to the site, but my reasoning applies to both. If you search for something, you're far more likely to find someone else asking and a third party telling them to search. That would happen on any search system, site or app, unless you can tie the answer to each question. And that's really why people don't search, because to ask and have someone answer can be quicker than sorting through shoddy results. Also, with the ROM updating as quick as it was, if you did find an answer in search, it could very well be outdated. Like the... what was it? Stability fix? A few weeks ago? A search would have said to flash it, but then I think it was the 11/18 build that integrated it. So you wouldn't want to flash that from that point forward.
With regards to contact pics, mine have always shown right up. They're all on Google, though. When I first got into Android, I went to Contacts (again, via web Gmail) and put a picture to everyone I could. Even company logos, e.g. pizza places and so on.
Only one that isn't showing up is the user badge, aka user switcher. It's just the blue generic thing. It did show up as me (my G+ profile pic) once on an earlier build.
Oh yeah, first full day with 12/5 bugfix and Elite GPE kernel (on Verizon)... 6 hours to 81%, says I have 32 hours left. I'm happy with that. Might leave it on overnight and see how far into the second day it runs.