ALR and I discussed this a couple weeks ago. One thought I had was to change the flow of the deployers to better handle/fit the VFS mounting model. This was also discussed during the VFS3 integration work. It would be ideal if the structure deployers were not forced to execute prior to invoking the rest of the deployers, but rather functioned as any other deployer based on inputs/outputs. The idea was to initiate the deployment with some specific metadata that describes deployment (file, directory, SWArchive, etc..). There would then be a series of deployers which look for these specific metadata types and would invoke the proper VFS mount/unmount operations for the deployment. Once the mount is performed, there would be an output that could be attached to inform the structure deployer to get fired. The structure deployes would get fired and the process would continue its normal flow.
The key change is to align the structure deployers with the Deployer API and actually have deploy and undeploy operations. Then you can introduce deployers in front of structure determination to handle proper mounting With this change, all that would be needed to integrate the ShrinkWrap Archive deployment would be to create the deployment (in embedded, TorqueBox, etc.) with an attachment that would cause a special mounting deployer to pick up and mount the ArchiveFileSystem as apposed to the normal filesystem based mounting deployers.
I realize this is a bit larger change than is being discussed with regard to the SW archives, but it also seems like it would better support the mount operations. Best of all, it would get rid of the Automounter.