My main point is that it should have the same release cycle as the rest of
tzdata, so that they won't fall out of sync, whether by creation of an entirely new zone that CLDR doesn't know about, or moving one to a different 'metazone'. This happens all the time and it only doesn't cause problems because nobody actually uses the data
Well, I use it. https://github.com/mj1856/TimeZoneNames Others use it too and I've commented on the release cycle problems before, in issues like this one: https://github.com/nodatime/nodatime/issues/473 Oh, you meant something mainstream, well: http://site.icu-project.org/ And I believe that's used by many major browsers, Chrome, FireFox, Edge, etc.
Incidentally, is there a CLDR mailing list? I feel like they should be a part of this, since what I'm suggesting is essentially a transfer of "ownership" of part of the data they currently maintain.
Yes: http://www.unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/cldr-users More details here: http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html