[nousermane]

> benchmarks don't compare to zstd.

  wget http://corpus.canterbury.ac.nz/resources/calgary.tar.gz
  zcat calgary.tar.gz|time zstd -19|wc -c

  902963 (=902.9KB, vs. 807.9KB for bzip3)

> "Better than bzip2" isn't exactly a convincing sales pitch

Sure, but nobody is pitching that. TFA does comapre to lzma (~xz), and claims bzip3 outperforms it quite handsomely in speed, while being competitive in compression ratio.