The link to issue #197 would be this one:
https://support.dcmtk.org/redmine/issues/197
However, it is only visible to users that are logged in, because it is a rather old entry that is written in German and it also contains confidential information (e.g. name and email address of the person who submitted the original request).
If you want to track issue #197, you should check the commit messages of the public DCMTK git repository, because we typically reference the issue numbers in the commit message. Something like: "This closes DCMTK Feature #197."
Could you maybe give me some idea of whether it's likely that this feature will find its way into dcmtk within, say, the next 1-2 years, or whether you deem it to be too low in priority / difficult to implement right for that?
Well, the above mentioned entry is over 19 years old, so it is not very likely that this feature will be implemented soon. Also priority is not very high.
Maybe, you'll find this blog post useful in this context as it explains "how are new features added to the DCMTK":
https://blog.jriesmeier.com/2013/03/how ... the-dcmtk/