Not including metadata is an opinionated stance, but I can certainly get behind it, especially as a default. 99% of the time I do not care about metadata when producing a file archive.
Compatibility with existing SQLite tooling is not just useful for debugging, it is extremely useful for writing alternative implementations. If you want Pack to be successful as a format and not just as a piece of software, I think you should do everything you can to make this easier.
In my experimentation, I wrote a simple python script to extract files from a Pack archive. Conveniently, sqlite is part of the python standard library, but in order to make it work with that version (as opposed to compiling my own) I had to edit the file header first, which is inconvenient and not always possible to do (e.g. if write permissions are not available).
Despite that inconvenience, it took less code than a comparably basic ZIP extractor, which is cool!
I worry that requiring a custom VFS will make it harder for people to produce compatible software implementations.
I think your concerns about people contacting SQLite for support are overblown. I assume you've heard the `etilqs_` story[0], but in this case, you need to use a hex-editor or a utility like `file` to even see the header bytes. I think anyone capable of discovering that it's an SQLite DB will be smart enough not to contact SQLite for support with it.
The `Application ID`[1] field in the SQLite header is designed with this exact purpose in mind
> The application_id PRAGMA is used to query or set the 32-bit signed big-endian "Application ID" integer located at offset 68 into the database header. Applications that use SQLite as their application file-format should set the Application ID integer to a unique integer so that utilities such as file(1) can determine the specific file type rather than just reporting "SQLite3 Database".
It's convenient that `Pack` is 32 bits long ;)
[0] https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/18cf47156abe94255ae14...
[1] https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_application_id