[development] Why is the Drupal File System relative to website root and not relative to admin/settings/file-system path?

[Clemens Tolboom]

Having a development test acceptance and production environment it's a
drag when moving the production database and files to an acceptance or
development environment.

One has to update the files database table and more tables or do
trickery with symlinks to get the site running clean.

If we could make the filepath in the files table relative to
the /admin/settings/file-system path the real files are relocatable
without pain. Just do a db load and a rsync to get the files and change
the dmin/settings/file-system path.

What do you think? Did I miss something important?