There's nothing really new about Apple's HFS+ apart from the fact that its rather underpowered as stated, how MacOSX handles the filesystem is just software. MAE works so its FileID is emulatable end of story, who cares how its done. Its just a sales tool to not have fsck, dump, cpio, and tar and a whole lot of other things not working, so that vendors can sell you a tool.
Apple could make Darwin work in sync with MacOS, as I said a year ago, there is no reason why except that Apple chooses not too. If they had done the proper amount of it would leave all the UNIX apps working as they should and all this conversation would not have to happen.
You can do fsck on unmounted devices, in fact UNIX would prefer it that way, single user is the next best thing.
example: fsck /dev/disk0s05
You can fsck any partition you like also.
But given Apple's lack of support for its own filesystem it won't do the job 100%, or at least I wouldn't trust it.
"dump" for the GUI bound could be renamed too "Bright Shiny New Backup Tool" and put a GUI on it for Strobe so he can hit his button, then all the GUI people would feel happy and safe, and nobody would know that it was dump all along.
9 Levels of backup, although you use Level 0 and 1 normally, level one does incerementals after you've done a level 0. Put it into a script and/or make a reference to it in cron and forget it if you like, don't even have to hit a button.
Clone-ing a disk is a piece of cake:
1. cd to target disk
2. dump 0uf - / (or device ) | restore -rf -
Bootable clones/backups are made this way, zero problem and you can do it accross networks!.
Now if MacOSX had programmed up a "dump" UNIX tool that worked, this would be a FREE and SIMPLE to use working tool. "dump" could quite happily be made aware of all of HFS+ bits and pieces (like all other vendors UNIX dump(s)) and work properly.
Whats wrong with that? Nothing!
I never said at any point that UNIX or its filesystem was the best, just that to dissmiss it as worthless garbage is intellectual nonsense.