That would be pretty great. Thanks for paying attention, and I share your hope that the final state of this problem won't be an open ticket.
Renders are extremely important right now. In the old style item pages, customers could see thumbnails of all photos of a product no matter what material was selected, and had one-click access to them. Now when a material is selected all images except those for that material disappear -- which for the majority of materials means that only a single render is shown. There's no evidence, in that state, that any photos at all exist, and no obvious means or incentive for a user to keep looking for them. This throws tremendous weight on the renders.
For the record I think this was a wrong choice. Thumbnail images of all shopowner-uploaded photos should always be shown, whether or not their material is selected. I understand that this breaks consistency, but it will sell products. Photos are what sell products. Do you want to be consistent or sell products? Shapeways is not rubber-side-down on this decision right now.
But as long as it's this way, we seriously need the renders to look good. It's costing us sales that they don't.