[dstillman]

Ask your colleagues to use the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero, which includes vastly better support for BibTeX-based workflows.

Zotero's built-in BibTeX export is mostly intended as a generic data transfer format to other similar tools. It could surely be improved, and we'd be happy for patches, but contributions tend to go to Better BibTeX, since that's what people who care about BibTeX are using. (Zotero will export ASCII BibTeX if you choose "Western" instead of "Unicode" for the export charset, though.)

(Disclosure: Zotero developer)