[astroH]

A lot of the work on distant galaxies is not being done with gravitational lensing. The idea is that you use massive objects in the foreground, like galaxy clusters, to focus light from the background. Depending on orientation, we can get magnifications of more than 10,000. There was a recent press release of such an example. So in principle, our telescopes combined with gravitational lenses can resolve almost all of the relevant detail we would want of a galaxy if the orientation is correct. It rarely is of course but there are a few examples so such strong lenses.