Moving files, images, flash and media directories outside of assets

I recently demoed MODx to a friend that was interested in using it for a project. When he asked how he should upload files when not using TinyMCE, I showed him the file manager ("Manage Files") under the Elements tab. He got a bit put off by the fact that the aforementioned folders were lying there together with other folders like snippets, plugins etc. He worried that someone might risk deleting stuff that should not be deleted and that would surely break stuff on the site.

I had to agree with his concerns and I started to think about moving the four folder used for uploaded files to a folder of their own, say /uploads/, so as to minimize any chance of the users mucking things up.

Is this a bad idea? If not, anything that I should think about while going about this?

Has no one really tried this before?

As long as these are accessible from your web space there is no reason why not. You can link to anything, and even change the paths and URLs for the file manager and the Rich Text resource browsers.

On the other hand, you can set the directories that a user can access in the Users tab for the file manager, and the Rich Text resource manager only allows access to the images or files or flash directories anyway.