Barry, using the compressed samples while working on the music is out of option imo. I don't mind if the loading speed would increase, like the memory usage also. Thats a normal, in fact i would very much prefer all my samples to be uncompressed and stored in memory after load, while i'm working, for the best speed.
Bare in mind that all these compressions would be a -choice- for people who will have benefits from it, and don't mind the "negative" sides of the process, not forced to every user of course.
I have 2gigs of memory and around 800gigs hdd space, fairly fast processor, so the space requirements does not bother me much also, but if i'm talking about backing up, song/sample management, it would be more better if they would use a lot lesser space. I'm not using any VST sampler, but the OMPT's own. If that would be the case, maybe i would see the situation differently.