Keni
I'm not as interested in having them thin as I am fitting them on screen... Meaning I have no real desire for them to be thin until I need them to be thin... 

 
Well, that's probably because you or the people you hire perform very well and you don't need tens of lanes. When I have my friend sing or when I have to sing myself, I end up creating tens of lanes (due to both the poor singing performance and the Comping recording mode's inability to use existing lanes). When I have 40-50 lanes, it's such a pain to audition takes with mouse scrolls or rearrange the lane order. Both were so easy to do with these thin lanes! For me, this bug is the best thing that happened since the introduction of the feature in X2 (maybe it has always worked this way and I just didn't try it in a track that has tens of lanes). 
 

Reminds me of how layers used to get smaller and smaller as you added them which I actually hated because they wouldn't go off screen. They would just get infinitely smaller making them unuseable after a certain point.
 
With this though, if the mini lanes can be scrolled afterward, then it could be useful and just a matter of adding just enough to get the res you want.
 
SInce it's a "bug" though I doubt it's that easy. It really does seem like old layers code getting activated somehow based on those larger pics. Meh. Breaking stuff in interesting ways is cool in itself.