however it's not possible to integrate that easily into EAC since it requires all tracks to be encoded at once by LAME.

Many moons ago, I posted to the EAC Yahoo group asking for an option to rip the whole album, then encode it, which would make for --nogap friendly operation of EAC. However, the author didn't see the value in it. Maybe if more people lobby for this feature, he'd consider it. I have to re-rip and re-encode some day, and I'm hoping this feature shows up.