My personal view: I don’t expect my DAM/raw development tool to physically move files around during import as default. There are specialized solutions such as rapid photo downloader for this part, which provide the backup functionality as well. It would, however, make sense as an option (or at least an option for disabling this part would be reasonable). Furthermore, it would be great if it could coexist peacefully with other tools (darktable, rawtherapee, photoflow, photivo), at least not touching their sidecars or, even better, integrate with them somehow (e.g. when you set the author/title/tags etc., respect what’s in their xmp/pp3/whatever.
When filmulator is called with an image (e.g. at the command line), it would be great if the development process would be available, skipping the DAM part.
What I was always dreaming of was an integration of photo management (in my case darktable) with git and git-annex (https://git-annex.branchable.com/), since I have xmps in git and plan to put raws into git-annex. But that goes way beyond your question. I just could not resist 