It sounds like you are squeezing my suggestion into a very specific solution. If there was a fix not tweaking current knobs but that made low numbers of element

It sounds like you are squeezing my suggestion into a very specific solution. If there was a fix not tweaking current knobs but that made low numbers of elements cheap, while subsequently minimizing resizes when some reasonable heuristic for "mid-size to large" hash tables kicks in, you would oppose it universally? Resizing a small number of elements is not going to be bad.