I recently opened T302357. It was closed as a duplicate of T200866. Since that later ticket is 3-1/2 years old, I assume not much is happening to fix the problem. The close/dup statement said, "If you think MediaViewer should handle the error condition differently, you can file a task for that." Here it is. For an image featured on the front page, we need to do something special. Having the front-page featured image fail to render is sub-optimal.
For particularly high-visibility images (i.e. on the front page), could we pre-render (manually, if need be) the image in all available sizes and cache them somewhere as static images? Could we have a way to specify in the image tag that a particular image is exempt from the normal rendering timeouts. Or at least is given a longer timeout?