[pin87a]

Doesn't really help with fan art, but you can decrease the size of the regular thumbnails by putting the following into advancedsettings.xml.
(/Users/frontrow/Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/advancedsettings.xml)

Code:

<thumbsize>192</thumbsize>

This makes the Thumbnail and Poster Wrap views (with fanart still off) a bit more usable.

[BORIStheBLADE]

The other thing I'm thinking is these are all stored on a NAS, is there anyway of having a folder on the appletv that'll hold these jpgs and scrape them from there? Like what you can do with srts? That should speed things up a bit more if this stuff isn't being cached right?

I agree, if we might be able to store the art on the Atv it might help. I would like to see if we can do that.