Dear Customer,
We're expert in drupal since 2008. (starting with Drupal 6.0.0) and be able to put Drupal as an European Comission accepted solution.
We've also debug some projects for different reasons...
In your case, my impression is that the real error is when the code try to get the entity of the image field, maybe how you said because you can set it in the view field configuration...
I can spent 3-4 hours to try to solve this... If we need more hours i will comment you to cancel our work (or expand if what he found is interesting for you). If we need less you will have this in 1 day!!! You don't loose nothing.
Kind regards
Javier