hardcoded path for profile avatar or by design?

It seems that users' avatars are saved in users table using full path, i.e:

files/pictures/picture-1.jpg

and so on, where "files" and "pictures" are the defaults paths after install.

These records seems not to update neither after changing picture image path in admin/user/settings nor file system path in admin/settings/file-system. It would make sense to only save picture name, as the two paths can change from default ones and can later result in failures when migrating multi-sites.