Unity / Mono crash at project load - out of memory on importing assets

We've run into a situation, when dealing with large assets (textures of 4096+ etc) leads us into situation, when Unity is no longer able to load the project properly (it crashes with out of memory on importing assets). We are unable also for example to batch-process assets from script due to the same problem.

It seems that Unity is not able to release the loaded assets from memory in a convenient way even when they are not required, and therefore it quickly runs out of mem. We've tried DestroyImmediate, GC.Collect and other methods but to no result.

And when you work with retina iPad or think of retina Mac, those large textures are not overkill, but neccessity.

Therefore, better memory management OR jump into 64-bit is neccessity.