I agree that it's a good format. It's an engineering compromise. The benefits you see also cause creshal's comment:
> Beginning and the end, which continues to bite us in the ass until today, where we regularly stumble over bugs when one part of a toolchain uses one entry and the rest the other.
Do you think creshal is mistaken?
Of course they are due to bugs in the toolchain. That's a natural consequence of the file format. That's the whole point of creshal's comment.
What do you think I'm trying to say, because I don't understand your responses based on what I thought I was trying to say.
The concept of metadata redundancy isn't anything specific to the archives, the filesystems do it too, and it's always an engineering trade-off, and I consider the one in Zip format is a good one, based on the real-life examples I've given.