Because there’s no way to 1) predict how long a downsize operation will take and 2) know what % we need to use to downsize a xMB image to 1MB image.
If you know the answer to either one of those points, please share 
So we do it the hard way. We indeed only do 2 80-%-downsizes. From my testing, these values seem to be a good balance between successfully resizing large images and not taking too much time trying to…
I might make these values (“# of attemps” and “% of downsize”) new site settings, but I also don’t want to give users an easy way to 
themselves in the :shoe:.