You're right, didn't notice the image loading option in the articles menu. And it does work for me with the feeds I tried. I think a general setting for loading/not loading on display would be nice for a later version.

The Icon didn't show up so far, although I did reboot once since the install (and I cant seem to find the cli icon-cache update command right now). I noticed that some packages do the icon-cache update on install/uninstall (at least they show a notification that says they do). Maybe something like this would be an option for your package.