Sure, it's not a solution in and of itself. It's useful to destabilize you from well-rehearsed thought patterns, though - and if you manage to hit the Ballmer Peak of soggy introspection, maybe you can manage to make some progress.
What issues have you run into with gzipped tiles? I store a lot of gzipped individual tiles for use in Mapbox GL maps on S3 with no problem - the only necessary change was making sure that S3 was emitting `content-encoding` headers.