Personally I never understood the problem with tar balls.

The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish.

Examples:

  tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l
  cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x

You never need anything else for the 99% case.