Okay... some good developments with this.. mainly a friggin' customizer!
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=427392
This is sweet... you can remove the pointless tabs and move everything around easily.. I was able to remove some of the hoggish tabs and M2D is now actually working well.. much faster and it is only eating 2.9mb now which is totally tolerable.
I removed Internet/Photo/Music which I find all of them to be pointless and I honestly think Music was taking the most memory but I haven't really done any testing.. this is good too because in addition to removing the tabs, I also didn't install all the cabs those ones require as well so ended up saving a lot of memory on the device all around. I also didn't install Opera Mobile cuz I think it's too much of a pig on our devices... prefer Mini and can launch that from the IE button... photos is pointless and the viewer was kinda dumb compared to Resco.. and don't get me started about the music player.
just fyi for those who like m2d but didn't liek the extra junk and/or people who want to tone down the memory it takes. check out that customizer app!