Without exaggeration I have had to download a zipped tar, that contained a rar split into ~100 parts, which contained an iso which contained a custom installer that extracted the compressed game files.
Seems to be overkill.
With an unpacked release I can pick and choose what to download, if it's on a newer patch level I can just point it at an existing folder and it will just download the difference. And of course I don't have to jump through the stupid installation hoops.
Thats pretty much the entire point of this, they stated these are all scene releases. So fitgirl et al etc.
For some masochistic reason they sometimes come rar'd, iso'd, and custom windows based unpacker which is all really unnecessary and creates more points of potential failure for the linux gamer.
LinuzRules releases have linux .sh based unpackers, but even those arent guaranteed to work and can get stuck. I'd much rather just get the complete uncompressed files.
Tl;dr Scene releases use unpackers which often fail and multiple levels of unnecessary compression.