Feature Concept: Semi-Static pages?

I'm using Gallery2 in a shared hosting environment with limited mysql resources and because of this I've found Gallery1.5 to be several times speedier. Still, I would like to use Gallery2.

I haven't delved too much into the code of G2, but how difficult would it be to make semi-static versions? Things like click count and random image could still be database driven, but the more static information would be .. well, static. ie captions, descriptions, photo properties, image location etc.

When logged in as administrator you would see the dynamic version and you can add an album or picture, change descriptions etc. but when you are done, you must click PUBLISH before the changes go "live".

the way i see it,
http://gallery.mysite.com/main.php?g2_itemId=6409

main.php would still connect to the database for security, authentication etc, then include('../securedir/published/item6409.php'); (or something similar) which would contain mostly static html with some php for the dynamic portions.

In the grand scheme of things this is obviously possible and I know that there exists a gallery2->purely static html converter, but how reasonable is this to accomplish?