Dense connections do not use the compartment offset (i.e. it's always 0 for all axons), so there's no reason we couldn't use population axons here to reduce the number of output/input axons. This is akin to expressing a dense connection as a convolutional connection with a 1x1 image shape (and maybe that's a viable workaround for doing this in the current setup).
Result of internal discussion is that we'll just recommend manually doing the 1x1 convolutional connection for now, unless more demand crops up for this.
Dense connections do not use the compartment offset (i.e. it's always 0 for all axons), so there's no reason we couldn't use population axons here to reduce the number of output/input axons. This is akin to expressing a dense connection as a convolutional connection with a 1x1 image shape (and maybe that's a viable workaround for doing this in the current setup).