But that does make me wonder why the large art tags are causing imports to fail. Why isn't it just ignoring them?

Because it was a bug.

More details:

- If your MP3 file starts up with a bunch of bitmap garbage that's something other than MP3 audio frames, how is the importer going to know that it's really an MP3 file? You certainly can't waste the importer's time on fully scanning every file out to the end. It's gotta give up and move on to the next file eventually. If it didn't, you could accidentally drop your Windows directory onto Emplode and be forced to reboot the computer as it tried to locate valid MP3 files.

- The only way it can accuratey determine the content of an art-tagged file is if the art tag is very small, or if the file starts with a valid MP3 header (allowing the scanner to skip on to the proper MP3 data).

So, there's still nothing it can do if you have both bad MP3 headers and a huge piece of art garbage at the beginning of the file. But they did fix one bug where even in some proper cases, it was still mis-detecting and rejecting the file.