I guess changing this is a feature request which is not worth writing but here are a few remarks:
I don’t think you would have to pre-load them.
A) I doubt the view is changed often
B) you could always load them when the view is changed
Apart from that:
– server space is really not a limiting factor these days
– loading 3 small images is probably less traffic than one really big one
And isn’t the process you described the usual WordPress procedure except that you can decide which formats to produce and the theme/plugin chooses the one that fits best?
And a little off topic: Is there a way to turn the different views off? I can hide the drop-down in CSS but I could imagine that a lot of code-loading could be saved doing this deeper in the code…
Thank you and kind regards
Jonas