[stavros]

If I want to open the README in a multi-gigabyte archive, why would I expect to extract all of it, even as a setting?

This seems the expected and reasonable behavior to me, as a second data point.

[amoshi]

Because of the behaviour I detailed in my initial post? Wouldn't apply to ReadMe's though, it doesn't have to be that dumb. At least one other poster agrees with me in the comments too.