Heh, ironic you mention that.  Because not long ago I had it the way you just mentioned, and people were pissed off that it looked like the whole thing was starting over from scratch.  Especially when they interrupted the initial DB build and restarted it.  I changed it from what you just requested, due to popular demand

Admittedly, maybe I can change the behavior when you're mostly synchronized already, versus in the middle of the huge DB build operation...