Hi,
interesting feedback, however i'm not personally familiar enough with SDK Data Access Extensions to comment. perhaps Alper DericiJay Xiong Dong Pan will be along to comment later.
I had a look at the Lumira DAE SDK guide http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/vi01/en/lum_120_dae_dev_en.pdf
and it does explicitly call out "preview, edit, and refresh" as 3 distinct phases where the datasource is hit. (there's a neat flow diagram on page 10 in the above link)
It might also be useful if you fleshed out the thinking/solution behind your "workaround which avoids two calls"
Thanks & regards,
H