Well, the main reason for the recovery partition is so one does not have to use any type of boot disk to try repairs.
That is pretty much the only reason really-convenience .
As far as Macrium, that is not the same....Macrium can reinstall the image, but unless you make an image every day you will never have everything. Yes you can set Macrium or Acronis to track things and keep track and blah, blah, blah. I would rather not have all that BS running in the background while I am trying to work on a project. I make a new image every week or so. I disable all types of scheduling and background processes in Acronis (same as Macrium which I also have)
Windows of all versions are famous for having boot issues, sometimes simple and sometimes not.
You are telling me that anytime you cannot get your system to reboot you replace everything with an image? Ok thats cool I guess.
But I have learned to troubleshoot and diagnose issues. Image is my last resort. Always.
This was not a cannot boot issue, really just a PIA and it pissed me off---at MS.
Hey look, I understand. If you noticed, before you posted this I had hours ago changed the title to solved.My solution was I do not need it. But it has nothing to do with images. I have boot disks of various types so I can troublweshoot. It just bothered the hell out of me that MS would give me the tools and video for converting a drive to GPT so it can utilize the UEFI process but neglect to tell me it would nullify the "convenient" recovery partition.
Yes images are great, but not for every issue.............