Yes, it needs to be done, and will be done soon ... somehow
. I actually started looking into this some time ago before initial beta, but for the reasons mentioned, I had to place it on the shelf for a while to focus on other matters ...
Slightly off-topic, I really don't think your "pagerank" would be affected by Flash or not. Flash DOES have tremendous affect on SEO, but it should not have an impact on pagerank, which is by definition a ranking decided by incoming links. For example, our X2 flash demo gallery has page rank 6:
https://www.photo.gallery/demo/x2/ ... Even if we changed it to X3, it will still have pagerank 6. Pagerank is more of a "reputation" index, unrelated to the content ... A page can have a high pagerank, yet have very very poor SEO performance, like our X2 gallery page.
Also, Adding separate "image pages" in X3, would not have any impact on existing X3 pages. They will not add any pagerank or SEO performance benefit to your home page, or folder pages. However, they will naturally add the SEO benefit of becoming indexable canonical pages for a specific search that is highly related to a specific image.