Thanks Greg for sharing your thoughts on this. My opinion on this is : if you are getting some very needed features from an executable ( like for eg. some GNU Utilities ), then we can always extract the executable ( and its libraries if any ) alone from its tcz file and keep them all in some new home directory folder ( not install it in /usr/local/bin, as they take precedence and cause clashes ) and use it in our scripts with the new path prefixed. Add export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=newfolderpath;$LD_LIBRARY_PATH at the top of the script, after the shebang line, to help the executable pick up its needed libraries, if any. This way you can even port executables from other linux systems of similar architecture ( use ldd executable_name command to detect only special libraries referenced by it and copy them all up to a single new folder and tar it )
Now, the purpose of sharing this whole thing, is to help the tce maintainers, keep track of all parent site download URLs for changes, in an automated way, especially if they are doing it manually now.