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This would be cool... but I think there may be some problems with how this would work that would actually have the inverse effect and increase thermo a lot if you did this.
Painting strokes aren't actually a list of fleck positions, but of points along the line that was drawn. For example, a line made with the ruler tool will have 2 points in it: the beginning and the end of that stroke. If you make a very quick motion with the controller to draw a very straight stroke it could have only 2 points also. Most likely it will have several as it's hard to draw a straight line with the human hand, even quickly.
This is also how we can easily set the beginning/end of a stroke--it's not skipping flecks, it's moving along the points of the stroke. And how it can animate flecks moving along the stroke--it's not moving 1 fleck to the position of the next fleck, it's beginning the render further along the points of the stroke.
So it's a lot cheaper on data stored, and allows for more interesting animations and effects because it's not tied to the positioning of specific flecks within each stroke.
Fleck density doesn't skip parts of the data like stroke start/end does; it just leaves gaps as it works its way along the stroke without being able to actually skip points. It doesn't turn them into several 1-fleck-long strokes. So merging and keeping the changes wouldn't make sense for that, I think. I can see the utility in it, but this is the logic as to why it doesn't work like this I think.
So a stroke is a list of points. The renderer then starts from the first point in the stroke and moves along toward the next point. As it goes, it renders a new fleck every 1 "pixel" (lets say for the sake of argument). With a lower fleck density setting, it renders a new fleck every 2 "pixels" etc.--leaving gaps between them.
If it were to bake in the fleck density, instead of storing 2 points for that long line... it would now need to store 500 points, two for each new stroke (or at least 1 per fleck)--ballooning the data required to store that painting, and defeating the purpose of using it to lower thermo.
Fleck density is still useful for optimising rendering because it's rendering fewer flecks. And can be used in conjunction with "stretch fleck" to cover the gaps of a line while still rendering far fewer flecks per stroke.
All that said........ they do actually have a "reduce detail" type tool for paintings in the works! https://trello.com/c/x5NC0ZmA/211-paint-reduce-detail-tool