As you said, might not be many newcomers but what of those who made the tools and are gone? I for one, do not have any knowledge in making such a tool and certainly no time or desire to learn making one.
Well, can't say much about the tool makers, but we still have ways to counter it, as I've said, just extract the whole CASC and fill it to a MPQ and you are done.
It seems that we have mixed feelings, where some are in favor and some are against the CASC patch. Assuming that we do not actually get to control it, and it will happen anyway, should we create a dedicated list of what tools we know we want for WarCraft III modding that we want somebody (community, Blizzard, etc) to maintain regardless of how the game data is stored? That seems like a good possible next step.
I honestly doubt they will, nor that they should. Third-party tools are never a concern to any company and it would be wrong to actually do care about such things. All you can hope is that makers of said third-party tools will adjust to the change and update the tools they once made.
We have never seen blizzard making any other thing, but plugin for 3ds Max, aka Blizzard Art Tools. You could of course try and ask them, but honestly I fail to see how that will change anything. Also, I really doubt that Hive won't have people with good knowledge of C++, thus code of Magos could be use to be merged with CASC library and at least one tool will work, but that is yet again just my assumption.
Still, hoping is a good thing and I for one do agree, that it would be good, if Blizzard themselves somehow aid modmakers, but I still can't see that as a possibility, which is kinda sad.
However, truth to be told, if we really gather a list of tools that relied on the MPQ to work, will we really get a big list? The most relevant ones are: MDLvis, Magos, W3x2Lni (which will work if you extracted data beforehand or ask someone to share his with you), Vexorian (but why would you use it now, as it is really a bad tool that actually malforms file and makes host-bots have a rough time with it), Wc3SlkOpt( also outdated due to W3x2Lni).
If I did miss any, please do let me know, I am actually curious about the list we will have in the end.