Got the same problem – as an awful lot of people use custom fields for images and as such should also include quoted alt tags (so changing templates is not much help), I think this counts as a pretty serious problem.
Been WordPressing from the very beginning and this is the first time I’ve come across something so frustrating.
Is there any way to upgrade Ticket #7346 to severity: severe?
Don’t want to sound negative but it seems to have been knocking around, unresolved, for too long. Is there anything else we can do? Work-arounds for something so basic are not really on.