Why the load time?

[Commander Gizmo]

After my recent attempt to get SH3 running just right with GWX 2.1, I definatly began to hate watching that progress bar run across the screen at app startup. That begs the question, just what is it loading there? I know it is loading the menu GUIs, but obviously there is more going on. A few questions arise:

• Why is there no speed loading mod widely used?
• Does the menu backgroun movie (a bik, I think) load, or just stream from file?
• Can we effect what is loaded at app launch and what is loaded at game start?
• Why is the artwork for the loading screens much larger than the screen area it fills?
• Why are so many blank textures not incredibly small, or just reused from the same file?
• Does the game allow modders to choose what sections of what files are used where on the screen?
• Can the modder choose tiling or stretching of a texture piece to fill an area of the screen?
• Has anyone attempted to optimize the loading time?

Since the GWX team has moved on and this game appears to be reaching some sort of modding maturity plateau, this seems like a good time to visit this topic and perhaps clean up a few things. Looking at the texture and config files, it looks like a real mess with terrible efficiency. No offense to any of the great modding teams that have worked so hard to make me love this game so much! Most of the mods stick pretty close to the stock file naming system.