TL;DR
Loading sprites seems to already be multi-threaded... Can the threads be kept in the background, to stop having the Main Menu inaccessible before that task finishes?What ?
Going through the whole graphics defaults issue made me (yet again) long for such a feature... Basically: is there any reason why the game needs to fully load the damn sprites before allowing me access to the main menu?! When i just want to toggle some mods ( which results in repeated sprite-loading
), or look at the Options, or check the status/description/etc of a public MP game, i don't really need to have the sprite-loading status block my access, do i? Couldn't it be done in background and only delay the gameplay session start until all the textures are available? Maybe if you did it like openTTD to have a demo game running as the background for the main menu, then i'd understand it, but TTBOMK you don't (yet) have that. 
Using images
See attachments,From: current.jpg
To: mainMenu - tweaked (poorly).jpg
Why ?
Less time wasted by unneeded delays. And less frustrating for players in certain situations.Speaking from my current perspective as an experimental-branch user, i could use that time to read the changelog.
