@Justin:
Aha, looks like it got a bit further than this age has, as of yet, actually. We have only had one turn so far, even though I have almost singlehandedly managed to stuff this thread so full of tasty spam, its three pages long now... :)
As for the rar format, there ARE still commandline rar utilites.
However, you don't really need to worry about all those fancy icons in winrar, since it adds items to the context menus you get when you right-click on a file. I always just do the 'right-click on a newly downloaded rar archive' thing and pick the "Extract to new-folder-with-same-name-as-archive" option - no need to bring up the GUI.
Now, when you DO double-click on a rar archive and get that window, you can still forget about the icons - you can drag-n-drop files out and in of the archive lister, just as if it was any ordinary folder and even edit files in place, without prior extracting - this is very useful.
As for diskspace, rar has better compression ratio than zip and is a much smaller download than the equivalent GUI ZIP utility for windows.
I am not calling you a back-striver mind - if it were up to me, we'd all be using lha. :B
EDIT: Oh I did upload a zip version of the age release ('though not the project one), btw:
http://prairiegirl.net/cristofblog/chai ... o_v0.2.zip