What would be your benefit except of having to download less?

Have you tried 17.1 RC 1? There the Pull toolbar button has a popup menu (click and hold) containing the dialog-less Fetch command.

We consider to implement something like that in the near to mid future.

Could you please describe in more details why you want to customize the work-flow, what you don't like about the current (default) work-flows?

At the moment this is a technical limitation.

As a quick work-around you can use speed-search - just start typing the name of the file.

SmartGit 17.1 preview is not suggested as update when checking for new version. Please download it from http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/preview

Try Ctrl+Space in SmartGit 17.1 in the Add Tag input field.