Look, no offense... but why should a change like this be applied that is not in the stylesheet? I think it looks godawful - can I change this in my stylesheet? What about the standard practice of having the image on the right hand side of the screen - a standard design principle (look at any advertisment)? 
 :The feeling's mutual as to the respect, but I see nothing wrong with this. As to standard advertising practice, what of articles that have no lead picture but have nmany sections? It looks far better to have the contents where they are most logical (again, the main reason for the advertising practice is not so much to have the picture on the right as to have the main text body at top left - the first place the eyes tend to look for words), and certainly we don't need tons of white space at the top of the page. It doesn't work with all articles - it may not work with more than a small minority - but it is a useful option to have. I've tried it on my user talk page, and it clearly doesn't work there, but consider a page like List_of_volcanoes - imagine how that would look without some form of floating right-hand TOC. ...''