This seems pretty obvious to me once you say it, I guess I didn't understand what you were trying to say. It seems like that goes both ways, too... what I'm trying to say is that the amount of reconstruction work increases as the encoding size increases. You're offering suggestions for how to accomplish that work but it doesn't change the underlying fact that wider encodings require more work for reconstruction.

And that really was all I was trying to say... you don't make encodings arbitrarily wide because the space savings must be weighed against the reconstruction costs.