That is not an “inconvenience”. Using images with fine-tuning gpt-4.1 has worked since day 1.
How about if you ask fine-tuning team at OpenAI and not documentation why inference is failing and output is going into loops of empty messages on applications that have been working in the long term - and 4.1 is clearly documented under “vision fine-tuning” on Azure?
I suggest you refund the fine-tuning training fees for every single gpt-4.1 DPO and supervised fine-tuning that has ever taken place by any org if you are going to change the supported features after a year if removing the real-world utility and that is an official position and not what an AI told you.
There has always been success - going back to just after release..