My blueprint-book layout makes pretty heavy use of particular patterns of icons. It'd be nice if there were a display-mode where the icon-quads were rendered beside the entries - both the blueprint's (on the left end, before the title), and the path-components (inline.)

It should probably be optional, though; if icons aren't important to comprehension/selection, they waste a lot of space.

That is a great idea but it adds to the curren bottleneck of the whole mod...
You can get very basic data about the blueprint when traversal is relativly free but "deep" data (icons, labels, name) is expensive(the cause of lag) so I need a way to go around it.

I imagine you're going to be forced to do some async maintenance, yes? I'm not sure how friendly Lua is to parallelism, though, lol. Are there events for blueprint-updated you could hook?