I definitely want them to be able to choose any image and still have a particular order to the gallery. That’s why the first image approach doesn’t work for me. It restricts the gallery order.
I decided to just use the method where I add a separate ACF image field and have the gallery and image field only “see” images uploaded to the post. The user uploads to the gallery and then can select one image from the gallery as the “main image” with the image field. I think this will be the most intuitive way of doing things with the tools I have available.
