drupalib A place for library drupallers to hang out

Aaron Winborn's Drupal Multimedia (Packt, 2008) documents one of Drupal's most obvious deficiencies, media management. Drupal's built-in media handling capabilities appear rudimentary if you want to do anything beyond attach files to nodes. This deficiency is intentional and reflects Drupal's modular design, that is, contributed modules can be (and have been) developed to add specific functionality for different types of media.

How do sites that use a file manager such as IMCE or the file managers built into WYSIWYG editors configure the directory path settings? We're evaluating IMCE (using FCKEditor as an editor) and are not comfortable with storing uploaded files such as images embedded in pages or media/PDFs that are linked from pages in directories that incorporate user IDs, since we anticipate that a given node may very well have its owner changed in the future (use case: subject librarians change departmental responsibility). Do you put all uploaded files in one big folder?