Oh dang. And also, phew. I was gonna made a thread about this too. Good thing I saw it before I did it...
Mainly... it's about saving time. Now, I know that the person that creates the huge thing will have to spend some time; but if you consider how many people will be manually downloading each map, then think of the time saving that would happen if just one person were to make a single file.
I don't know about this single file thing, but in today's mass downloading frenzy, bittorrent is preferred. It'd also be a good idea to seperate the maps in the categories they're already in. Just make a bittorrent that has all the maps in their respective folders.
I know this would be 'n' GB and would take a long time to download, but there are those of us that would do it. And if bittorrent... would seed the bittorrent. Looking at the 250+ pages of maps here and 300+ at warcraft3.org... I certainly wish there was a bittorrent with all the maps.
It's certainly doubtful that we'd ever play all the maps, but the main idea is that we'd have a big enough selection to find a great deal of maps that we really like.
Another reason we crazy people want to download such a huge load is that we're hoping to, amoung the Gigs of maps, attain the good ol' maps that people don't have or play on Bnet anymore. I've recently found some people that have some good old maps, and have been able to find Smash CTV. This is also a favorite of mine from Starcraft, which no one has or plays anymore...
The main idea of a single file is to make it easier to get the maps. We'd rather spend our bandwidth 24/7 downloading a huge file than manually downloading and browsing through thousands of pages to find a certain map. Of course, if you don't, then we'll still be where we are now: manually downloading a single map at a time. Although, we prefer to d/l everything then test the maps, than download, test, download, test.