It's not even "offline", it is "online with a slow connection". On some level docker is a machine that turns 50kb of I/O into 3GB of I/O.

Over my slow connection I was completely capable of downloading 20GB games onto the XBOX, Playstation, Steam and such, it just took a while and the downloading software had caches and resumable downloads and all the facilities to deal with that.

It never did, I think because reliability is a "enterprise feature, call to talk to sales" kind of feature.

It works offline, you just need to get the images from somewhere.. it could certainly be a local network repository. You just need to propagate it somehow..