I’d say pixz is considerably more interesting to improve tar.

https://github.com/vasi/pixz

Used as a compressor with tar, it adds:

• Parallel compression/decompression, increasingly important with many-core processors.

• Indexed access. Tarballs, unlike, say, zip or 7zip, don’t normally support jumping right to the point in an archive where a file lives.

It’s LZMA-based, like xz, lzip, or 7zip. Good-but-slow compression, faster decompression than bzip.

Why do none of these have trackpads?

Maybe they’re trying to aim for the crowd for whom the Deck is too expensive, and shaving off some of the hardware helps?

I mean, it does sound like a significant drawback, but if you gotta get the cost down, I suppose that’s one thing to look at.