Except for a proxy bug which needs fixed, I'd love to know how you would possibly improve it even if you could do so by the mere snap of your finger. Because I wanted the best of both worlds. I want 1) the ability to clean / reduce an image, 2) WITHOUT losing the ability to retrieve the ancestry. Oh, and 3) it'd be nice if I didn't have to do a special UI operation to "retrieve the ancestry", just have the system retrieve it automatically please only if I do something in the IDE that requires it.
Again, assuming all the proxy-bugs fixed, what more could one want in terms of meeting all the demands we want as developers?
How about not downloading megabytes of data from the network when I didn't tell it to do that?
There are lots of operations in the IDE that cause network accesses, and none of them advertise in advance that they'll access the network. So this argument is not really a good one against.
Good grief. If I click on something in the IDE, I've told it do something. Depending on what I click on, network access may be quite reasonable. I'm not going to be surprised if opening a repository inspector on a remote repository needs to download data from the network.
On the other hand, network access when you're using "chase pointers" is not expected. It's also surprising when "Smalltalk fixObsoleteReferences" starts downloading packages from SqueakSource.
That's true, but those are just shallow bugs. I'm not willing to sacrifice chasePointers any more than am willing to sacrifice using Proxy's. That's why I make them work together, rather than restrict my toolbox.