A fairly recent copy of bzip can be found on
ftp.cygnus.com:/pub/egcs/infrastructure/bzip2-0.1pl2.tar.gz
and all other egcs mirrors.
Please note that gcc 2.7.2 is reported to miscompile bzip. I can
confirm this report; I could not unpack egcs 1.0 with a bzip compiled
with either 2.7.2 or egcs. Other reports indicate that reducing the
optimization helps.
In any case, I think it is up to the maintainers of ftp.kernel.org
to decide on distribution formats. If somebody does not like the
packaging, she can always offer an automated or manual service that
does the repackaging.
Regards,
Martin