I agree that cranking speed is crucial. These are indirect-injected motors so they don't start as readily as a direct-injected motor. My bus has a direct-injected motor about the same size and no glow plugs and it starts on half a crank even in the winter. An indirect motor has a lot higher compression ratio which makes it a lot harder to turn over, and the injection takes place in a seperate chamber--the real injection into the combustion chamber occurs via a bit of the fuel going off and blowing the rest of the charge out of a hole in the injection chamber. There's no heat in there during cranking. If you aren't getting a good 8-second burn out of the glow plugs that would be a problem.
Air in the fuel system would make it idle really choppy and keep dying. Not much smoke though. Lot's of hard cranking, then it fires is when it smokes a lot.
How about a video clip of it cold-starting?
There is one injection pump piston (it's two, actually, but they are in the same bore) and a distributor rotates to aim the discharge down each injection line. If there was a problem with the pump, I doubt it would start at all. If there is air in one or two lines, it could start readily, but hard. I'm guessing an injector or two isn't sealing. they hold fuel in the lines and the new injection event advances the fuel through the injector. If the injector leaks down into the pre-chamber while it is sitting, there will be fuel sitting in there ready to smoke when you start it. And that injector won't have fuel in it so it won't contribute when you first start the engine. I think it's time to get a set of injectors in there.
That's just an opinion, by the way--I haven't had that problem. If you have an electronic pump it could be something with that. I've gotten air in mine, but it was before the pump and the truck doesn't start at all and doesn't smoke when it does start. I also have found that Optima red-tops smoke any other brand I've tried when it comes to hard winter starts. I've had this truck 6 years with these batteries and I was lucky to get 2 out of my Walmart/Exide yellow truck batteries. Also, I installed a battery charger under the hood so when I plug the truck in in the winter it's also warming the batteries. It's very important to keep the batteries at 100% with these.