Magento's image helper is bloated and the performance impact is quite significant. 
Some of the complexity can also be removed because the gain is not that significant (example: the hash part of the image url).

I would like to be able to use a replacement with the following features:
- lightweight
- support for gd and imagemagick
- has nicer image paths

Optional:
- use a queueing system for the resize job

If others are interested we can spec this out further.

Update by Admin:
https://github.com/magento-hackathon/Perfect_Watermarks
https://github.com/monsieurbiz/Mbiz_ImageCrop