I think, it will be good to use game archives instead of thousands of very small files. as you know, hdd is very very slow at big number of small files. so, you need to pack resources into one big file, it make loading & installing much more faster.
Perhaps they will pack it into .gcf files once the mod is completed?
this was needs to be done for this release) people have waiting for a long time & they need to play this game good & fast ) but… when i played first half-life, i have pentium 1 150mhz & only 16mb ram. loading was veeeeeery slow, grafix was veeeeeery sad… but this game is great, because of this game i have start to learn programming & now i am the game developer. half-life has inspired me on it ) so now i have the same feeling (i playing on my laptop, loading is slow, & i have set grafix to max for having the same lags i have on 150mhz computer.)
My GTX 570 and Intel i7 3.0GHz runs it no problems.