Once and for all: Best plugin for avatars/gravatars for posts?

One more time:

What’s the best way to incorporate avatars/gravatars etc. into your POSTS? (For multiple-author blogs.) But so that you can easily exclude them from pages.

I want the avatars to be automatically inserted into the beginning of the post – under the header on the first line on the text.

Something like WP-gravatar works fine, except that you can’t exclude the gravatars from pages. (If I understand correctly, there’s only a setting so that you can exclude them from the comments on the pages.)

Plugins like Post Avatar don’t work as they require manually choosing the image on every post.

It needs to identify the author, so there won’t be mixups with the author faces.

Also the option to allow authors to use local avatars instead of gravatars would be a bonus.

Anything like this out there?

I have created a Thematic child theme, where I’m quite happy with only css and functions.php modifications.

I would like to resolve this with a plugin (or somekind of simple child theme solution) so that in the future I could update the Thematic host template without worrying about my avatars.

I feel silly asking this and wasting your time, but I’ve spent now two days trying out different plugins and solutions and I’m getting frustrated. (Such a trivial matter!) There must be a really simple answer. Still it seems that a lot of people are asking about this same thing without any proper answers.