Or they could have started with an MVP without thumbnails and html and improved it over time, would have been more valuable then having no preview at all.
They do say they needed html to provide even a non-broken preview, and I expect the text summary was the most tricky thing to do in any case, just guessing a good picture can't have been too hard.
In any case, they had something 2 years ago but it was blocked by the community for not being good enough.
