One thing I have always wanted was to have a switch, that would compress or decompress the file without the mod author having to make an external EXE to do so. Maybe you could add that to the manifest file with ## UseCompression: true for example.
If you choose to do that please allow the mod author to change that value as needed. Changing it would cause ESO to automatically know the difference and compress or decompress the information. Setting the compression to true for normal operation and false so the author could easily read the file. Not being able to see the contents of the file is not helpful.
Currently save games use LZ4 compression for Skyrim SE and Fallout 4 and I do not feel anyone has ever complained about there being a performance issue. LZ4 is intentionally meant to be fast even if it doesn't compress as much as other formats.
Would you please consider doing that? I don't see it being needed at all for any mods except mods with data collection such as Harvest Map, Master Merchant, or Tamriel Trade Center to name a few.
Using an exe from
https://github.com/lz4/lz4/releases I was able to compress a file to be significantly smaller.
Once you unzip the attached files, as you can see the uncompressed .lua file is 6610KB and the compressed version is 472KB,