Imagine if you were working on a map and you didn't have all your assets on your computer, say after a reformat... or you decided to help someone else with their map but didn't have the same media/assets... those assets would disappear from the map and i believe the reference data for those assets gets removed as well.

This is not the best practice. Instead a model of maybe a white box with a question mark should appear in place of the missing media and an error prompt to let them know how many missing files have been encountered.

This would allow for people to work on maps without all the media there, if for any reason something is missing and then once they open the map again say a computer with all the media, everything reappears nicely. A lot of modern day game engines have this feature. Its just an idea

Does this section of the forum even get looked at?

It does Teabone. In the mapbank folder if you have missing media there will be a .log the same name as your map file showing you which media is missing. Not as modern as you might like, but effective none the less.