Hello Mike,

thanks for the feedback, it is really nice to see that your clients are satisfied with the product.

Unfortunately, in Joomla all accessible media needs to go through the media manager. This is the only way to upload images I am afraid.

There is a way to have a better separation with files (in the media manager, you can choose a folder for all accessible files and have the 'images' folder to be a sub-folder of it. But that has to be done before going to production because it changes all image paths (see the media manager global configuration).
That is the extent of what you could do...

You are welcome Mike.
My best to you!