Yeah, in this case it was either do that or create the symlinks by command. I was short on time being in the middle of other things and took the easy route with this one. Naturally, using cp or rsync to copy symlinks is a no go to work across both ram and mount usage since in mounted form the symlinks become symlinks to the files in /tmp/tcloop. Creating the symlinks would have really been more correct but the difference is only a few bytes in a 110MB extension.
I don't normally use a tarball for files to be copied, but if they are numerous or large it would actually help save on space and simplify the startup script. Of course, for normal files either "cp -p" or "rsync -aL" will work across both modes since those commands copy the target of the symlink rather than the symlnk itself.