I agree with the general sentiment that this is great, but would it be
possible for these TDS-compliant archives of the LaTeX trees themselves
to be on CTAN, somehow? Seems like it would be useful for CTAN to hold
these improved/optimized zip archives as well as (or maybe even instead
of) the autogenerated ones.
And having them on CTAN makes it easier to use them for TL (and other
distributions, I imagine).
Perhaps, for example,
macros/latex/base-tds.zip
macros/latex/required/cyrillic-tds.zip
macros/latex/required/graphics-tds.zip
macros/latex/required/tools-tds.zip