Probably one of the worst aspects of SL is the texture loading lag, and the bland ugly way the world looks while waiting for textures to load up. There needs to be a way for the world to look at least somewhat decent, until all the textures can load.
I'm thinking that probably the best thing to do would be to add a hidden color parameter for each side of a prim, so that when you're done editing a prim, the engine makes an average of each face texture. For a basic wood block, it's default base color would be a flat featureless yellow for every face.
If you're familiar with Gaussian blurring, this would be like a gauss blur that averages the colors of every pixel in a prim's face texture.
This way when the world loads prims, it instantly has color data available to give the prim at least some semblence of what it'll look like when all the textures have loaded.
The additional load to the sim database is not incredibly huge, though an extensively cut prim may have 14 or so face colors to store. Assuming 24-bit color is used, that's 42 extra color-data bytes to store per prim (3 bytes per face), but with the advantage that the world will at least look somewhat normal when the prims first load... just really blurry.
This would really go best with a demonstration, which I could probably pull off with a photo editor and a screenshot, outlining a prim's surface and doing repeated Gauss blurs until each face is a single flat color.
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