The thing about compression is that there is no single "more optimized" knob - there's a bunch of different tradeoffs.
Want a compression algo that can compress existing images to smaller sizes than JPEG? You can already do that with neural image compression. Want a compression algo that can decode that compressed image in 0.01 seconds? You need JPEG.
To co opt your knobs analogy I imagine each of the steps of a complex image compression pipeline comes with its own knobs each with its own tradeoffs. The dream here would be to tune all those knobs at the same time to optimize some sense of quality in a particular image. Of course huge disclaimer I’m not an image or signal processing expert. It’s also very possible that these “knobs” have been tuned well enough so that even if we optimized them for a specific image the quality difference would not be noticeable.