With regard to your concern on 'wear' on USB devices, are you
aware of the SD manufacturers' ass'n warnings about using Microsoft
or Linux formatting as opposed to manufacturers' ass'n formatting?
I can dredge up a link if you are interested.
I think this may illustrate the need for a nowear option, as it seems to indicate that the writing pattern (determined in part by formatting) influences flash device lifetime. I myself try to use standard Unix/Linux tools as much as possible, so I think going into this is more for the file tools developers than for me. I haven't had problems with flash device wear by normal use, the biggest threat for mine is getting into the washing machine, which they may or may not survive .

an option to easily add new boot commands using knoppix.sh
This is very interesting, I think. I consider it as touching upon the boot loader use issues. For example, when I use grub for booting and just enter a standard Knoppix command line for it to run, I don't get the chance of entering boot options manually. Which is, generally, what I want. For me, and many other users, specifying boot options do not belong to normal use. BUT: When you need it, you often need it badly.

dinosep, have you looked into the modifications necessary to implement this? Most of the other suggestions (the boot part of them) should be implementable by modifying minirt.gz, eventually /etc/rc.local - how much more is needed here?

As for discussing such aspects of Knoppix development, I think this forum is nearly perfect. In my opinion, it is much better to approach Klaus K on the Debian Knoppix devel list with suggestions we have already tested ourselves - our friend Ryumbeke does this, and I think it works well. I also think it is better that we try out our ideas on something that is in effect Knoppix derivatives, rather than directly modifying Knoppix itself.

We could, for example, go all the way and make a version using squashfs for the compressed image and grub4dos/grub for all booting (not sure if grub4dos works with CD/DVD though) If we have a small suite of scripts to routinely turn standard Knoppix into this variant, it would make a stronger argument for applying the same changes upstream than just suggest them to Klaus K, I think.