I understand why it did what it did, but I didn't want to spend the time digging in and changing its behavior.

The view options are what killed it in the end.

The thumbnails issue was just me looking at the sausage and like "ugh, I wouldn't have done that."

It's always a tradeoff between time and work. I would have done a sliding window around the current screen, but then you might have placeholders. Maybe it should do low-res first and generated hi-res thumbnails 3 pages out while scrolling. But that's a lot of work for the 10% case.

What I want is aperture back, with all the fun AI stuff and using Affinity for photo editing (which I have anyway). I'll add that to my queue of projects I guess.