Egor,

Can you provide any additional insight into what might happen with this going forward in terms of what would determine if Adobe feels something like this might be worth exploring? Would I be contacted in such an event to be informed to keep an eye out for something in the future or should I forget I submitted this idea and continue to explore other avenues?

Egor,

Yes, I think that would be a very accurate way to categorize it. And it doesn't necessarily have to be baked into AI. It could be a stand-alone utility, either GUI or command line, that could scan a folder and open every file in that folder and do the work. That would probably be the more ideal solution as you wouldn't have to have Illustrator open every time to use it, nor would you have to have licensing for Illustrator if you wanted to assign that task to, say an intern, that otherwise wouldn't use it.

On another note: if a suggestion made here actually gets developed, does the person that submitted the idea get wind of it so they know that something is at least progressing?

Now I get it, thank you for the explanation.
Can I think of it as an 'automation relinking problem'? So that Ai would be able to auto-relink files by their name in a selected folder (which it now can’t do, unlike InDesign).
There is an existing request for this, although it does not state that specific reason for links to loose their paths.

AFP is a very old protocol, and has been deprecated by basically every vendor, including Apple. At this point in time, if you want to switch file protocols, you need to MANUALLY update each and every file link in a given ai file to restore full links to every external resource being referenced. Our company has hundreds of thousands of ai files built up over decades. Our artists have used macOS for that time as well. When those links are broken, content does not display.

As it stands, per Adobe's own CS group, the only way to do it is to pay MORE money to a 3rd party vendor to write more software to do it (why should we pay more to someone else for support for software we already pay support for?) that won't be supported as it should or have someone manually open each and every file and change those links. It just seems like there should be an easy way to do it as Adobe is the developer of the software and has very easy access to write a tool perform this task.

As for how we're using it now, we utilize Acronis as a middle man to convert those calls to AFP. This measure can only last so long though, so it's best to be proactive and start making the switch over on our terms.

Jeff, can you give a bit more details on this?
Why do you want to have this conversion? Why only this? Is there a practical difference? I’m afraid I never had issues with protocols.