Hi @Singlespeednut
Thanks for chipping in with a suggestion here in the AntennaPod community 
In fact you’re indeed not the first one to request this - long ago there’s been a similar request on GitHub (where the app is developed):
There was a discussion there but no final conclusion as it ties in to the whole auto-download & remove mechanism, which is quite complicated. The whole auto-download area now is under discussion on our forum. So it might be a while before you can expect an improvement in this area 
In the meantime I’d like to suggest to check out the Episode Cleanup setting if you use auto-download. It’ll clean up episodes for you in the background.