I do think, on a more general level, that it is a bit unfortunate that the format of the tzdata files is now effectively frozen because so many external users have chosen to parse the source rather than the compiled form. This will make it much more difficult to make changes in the future, should they be needed.
If my understanding is correct, the output from zic does not preserve daylight saving amount. TimeZone class in our project (ICU) exposes an API for accessing base offset and daylight saving amount separately for historical reason (same thing found in JDK Calendar class). This is one of the reasons why we decided to customize zic and use the text source format as input. I personally think consumers of our code don't care about daylight saving amount (mostly +1 hour, but few exceptions) although. -Yoshito