Is there consensus on the list that all of these changes are better
than what went before?
On the contrary, I don't recall seeing anyone but Paul voicing support for the changes in the Pacific and Africa, whether before or since the partial rollback. (Referring to the threads starting here and here.)
I
also think that, if we want to replace zone.tab with something better,
we should take the time now to make sure its replacement doesn't unintentionally retain any major shortcomings of the previous version, so we don't find ourselves
needing to supersede it again too soon. This is the proper time to do a
bit of forward-thinking: BEFORE releasing a new file or format into the
wild.