Hi Burr well there isn't any way to select something before it actually exists...

The edge display should not likely make or break an import anyway - hiding all the edges can speed up the number of frames per second of the display but hiding them should not have much impact on memory consumption. They're more compute intensive than memory intensive.

You can try making a coarser display mesh for the surface display though, to do that go to Options > View > Meshing parameters and set "Mesh angle" to 25 degrees and uncheck "Add detail to inflections" that will make a coarser surface display mesh and that one can help reduce memory consumption.

- Michael