For a stage, rather than having all images resolve for all steps within that stage, it would be a better user experience as well as a faster start-up time if the initialization process took into consideration not pulling images for steps that won't run. Personally, we are using a stage with several background processes that may or may not execute based upon user input to an input set. The conditional execution is explicit and known at the time of startup based upon a boolean value of true or false. I understand that for conditional execution involving expressions, this may not be possible, but with an explicit value like we are using, that shouldn't be an issue.