In reply to Kraft.

Thanks for the background info, Kraft.

Actually we are on opposite sides of this. Philosophically it's clear to me that Wordpress.org should be standalone software which is not dependent on any third party servers for anything.

Hence Jetpack (or any other third party service) support should not be added to Core under any circumstances. Requiring Jetpack is tilting the development environment entirely in favour of Automattic. I know that warms the hearts of VC's and Automattic executives but it's now what the independent developers who have worked ten years to build Wordpress (well nine in Foliovision's case) signed up for.

A better solution here would be to add the essentials of Photon to Core so better galleries are possible without requiring a third party server at all. I agree that adding image editing would be unnecessary and somewhat dangerous on shared hosting. Basic resizing and tiling should not be an issue though.