Easy enough
Agreed.
have yet to come up with another passive solution, which it seems is needed. A lot of people refer to the zip distro as a portable distro. It currently is far from it. If it was made "portable" and marked as such, I don't think mild differences would be upsetting. But we'd have to turn off local user hooks and hard path locations, the latter requirement being the current octave_packages problem.
I played around with whether the provided octave_packages could be written referencing %OCTAVE_HOME%, but didn't get anywhere. Might require pkg patching.
Other suggestions welcome.