This has been remedied in Plogger Beta 3. A good text editor can do a directory find and replace, with regular expressions no less, and there are several threads in the forum which address the issue.
It was an oversight. The Exifer library was not created by us, it is a third party package that we distribute with Plogger. On most servers, PHP shorttags are on and it works fine. In the core Plogger code, we ALWAYS use the full PHP tag.
If you are downloading a BETA version of an open source script, I expect a moderate level of proficiency in setting up web applications. Honestly, Plogger is one of the easiest image galleries to install and use and compared to "ZenPhoto" (you need a PHD to set that one up), it is a breeze.
I am a little put off by your attitude though, as if you are entitled to some sort of quality software when you clicked the download button. It's free, we support it in our free time, there are bugs, it is not perfect. Seriously, what do you expect?