Interesting question.  Although I see little usefulness of keeping the
relative position of a record in an Image database the same.  For the most
applications, "data is data" it shouldn't matter where in the database it
is, since it can usually be sorted and resorted to fit various uses.  I can
think of two exceptions:

#1)  Unless it is some sort of control record, for scheduling purposes or
controlling peripherals, but then I'd be tempted to use flat files to begin
with.

#2)  The only other instance I can think of is to change the value of a
record without leaving an audit trail, since sometimes it can be shown data
was modified simply because it ends up in a different location than it
originally was.

As I recall, the original reason for Critical Item Update was for
efficiency, NOT to keep the position of the record the same, although that
is a side effect.  This was because the only other method (that was
terribly inefficient) to have to delete a record just in order to put it
back with a different key value.