@gebeer I moved away from WordPress years ago and the very first (and only) choice for this project back then was PW. I used and loved it at very first time and it really doesn't give me any pain its way to handle images. But now the customer wanna update and expand everything, and since his requirements for media managing are quite mandatory and an upgrade is required I'm watching for a solution which fits requirements and low-budget needs. I would never came back to WP if PW had this kind of field out-of-the-box.
@Macrura Pages (system, locked, hidden, abstract or in parallel dimension) are still pages, with their path on the system which isn't decoupled by the CMS managing (nothing I can decide before and keep in future if deep changes are made). It's still a relative path to a CMS hierarchy of folders always affectable by changes made by the superuser. If I decide in future to implement any kind of system to furtherly decouple the media archive from the CMS itself (for example, by implementing symbolic linking via virtual FS on another server) or implement other kind of things to preserve integrity of media archive (like, just for example, some kind of remote backup process) everything will always relay on a path which could change through the time by external conditions, breaking the decoupling idea of set-and-forget settings and, more seriously, breaking all image links (imagine to fix 1 or more image links per page per thousands pages).
@gmclelland Yes you got the point. A powerful CMS like ProcessWire that points to challenge the big ones on the market (and it can easily do that) should think about a solution out-of-the-box for media managing similiar to the one offered by the competitors. I'm not saying it has to provide n-thousands functionalities probably usefull for the 0.1% of the users, but a basic media library with the moreover already provided functionalities should be a must. (The CMS often is used for blogs and websites where presence of images is almost a constant, so the case is more than just a edge case IMHO.) For everything else there are hooks and plenty of space for developers to implement gazillions of features not basically required.
I've no knowledge in PW core and no time to spend in research how to take this and that from here and there just to put together something working for my case in front of the low-budget situation, so I have to relay on the cheaper solution with the most complete offer, and actually WP is sadly the answer for this case. I don't like the choice but there's no a valid alternative solution. (I also took in account Ghost and Strapi - which is the most similiar to PW for Node.js, but both lacks of media management too.)
That's it. If I will have spare time to go deep into PW core and find furthermore info about extending core Image module in order to add these functionalities, I'll do it with pleasure.