Hello,
We have been looking in to making a few modifications to edit tools to make it more useful, and spent some time discussing various solutions. At the moment we have a specification for some basic additional features [1] (waiting for auditing) but as it stands this does not solve all of the problems - and a more involved solution will be necessary to satisfy other requirements.
The first main solution to the problems outlined here would be to have an option in preferences to completely enable or disable the edit tools dialog. This shouldn't be difficult to implement, but lacks any fine grained control over what is displayed - if some of the edittools features are wanted, but not others. Control over the list of groups displayed would require significant changes to the charinsert extension, and is overkill in my opinion. A "memory" of the last selected box would be possible using JavaScript cookies however, avoiding the need to add any additional preferences.
To remove bloat from the page, as pointed out already, a lot of the stuff could be moved to within JavaScript (for example, many of the charinsert calls). I would shy away from any on the fly loading though, such as AJAX, as this adds significant additional overhead which is unnecessary.
It should also be noted that the edittools is usual ordered using script (e.g. Latin, Arabic) rather than language - so using language setting to control this would be unwise.
Regards, Robert Leverington (MinuteElectron)