Also, it's storing it in RAM in compressed form, and then once it decodes it, it puts it back into RAM.

Also, I wasn't being clear. Those cache files would be invisible/hidden so as to keep it form hindering
the Human friendly part of it all, and they would be modified as needed, invisibly. But you're right about
the bloat added onto the game and the dev time, so maybe it's not a good idea.

alright, it is only a suggestion, maybe works maybe not.
all depend by Data.

Hasn't Quake been doing this very thing with their .pak files? It's a viable method but even supposedly "simple" features like decompressing .zips in memory instead of reading raw files straight from disk can be costly to add from a software engineering perspective. The performance benefits won't outweigh the uncertainty that adding the feature won't take horribly long and cause headaches down the road. That's probably why it won't be added, not that it wouldn't have any benefits.
Instead it would be nice to have a feature to reload modified files at runtime so one wouldn't have to deal with the initial load any more than necessary.

The only thing this would speed up would be load times anyway. We'll all be using 8GHz hex-cores in 5 years or so when the next build comes out, so it'll likely be a redundant addition.

Yes and then the best thing of all will occur... a lag-less cc. Well fairly lag-less...

An i7 with ~3GB RAM runs vanilla CC lagless afaik.

If it can run Darkstorm, some of whitty's glowier mods, some TLB mods and a few of CaveCricket's mods laglessly then I'd certify it lagless. You're pretty much not going to have any more going on at once.