I have not worked with a website yet that didn't have a need for image-handling code, either to resize uploaded images, handle avatar generation, draw charts (although I suppose that's moving to client-side for newer apps), etc.

Frankly, the thing I liked best about the whole .net ecosystem is that it didn't go for the open source "release early, release often, release incomplete and buggy" philosophy. I'm just very disappointed to see Microsoft going in this direction.

If Microsoft isn't providing a rock-solid, feature-ful framework with impeccable backwards compatibility, who will? Nobody will.