possible
feature-request Release the data dumps in a format that is more widely supported, like .bz2, instead of .7z/LZMA. It would make it easier to programmatically handle the data dump data.
7Z also isn't very seekable. If a seekable format was used, it would be possible to (very coarsely) only download sections of the dump at once. For example, to only look at posts that have been added since the previous dump.