I've mentioned this issue many times over the years and have not seen any change.
If the user moves or renames a scene so that it's no longer in its original project directory, Maya converts all of the internal paths to absolute.
This is well-meaning inasmuch as it allows a scene to open without errors. Dependencies are resolved automagically.
But it is an utter disaster from the perspective of project folder management. It breaks the entire concept of relative paths. Projects are suddenly no longer portable. And the user gets no feedback about this. All of the paths get mangled without so much as a friendly "F U" from the UI. So users do not know that their paths have been altered. If the user backs up the project, those absolute external dependencies are not present in the current project. This causes data loss (or at least misplacement) unless the user is eternally vigilant and checks up on every asset.
This is one of the "absolute" worst design decisions ever made by the Maya team. I need to move project and scene files around all the time. And because of this well-intentioned but dysfunctional policy and algorithm, I am forced to manually re-path all of the moved scenes and project. This eats hours of my life each year, and it makes me angry. Thank heaven for the File Path Editor, which mostly automates the process of un-breaking the paths. Without that I would surely go mad.
Please add a preference to make this automatic re-pathing an option. Leave it enabled by default if you wish, but if so, at least send up a flag in the Script Editor messages at startup to let users know that their nice relative paths have all been changed to point at the last known locations of the files.
