Something else to consider -- the current TAR releases (well, the pretests anyway) have a wonderful hack: a script that takes the usage message and generates a man page. This might require enhancing the usage message some, for many of those programs, but that's something that can easily go back upstream. And the programs are, after all, simple.
That would probably be minimally sufficient -- it's worth noting that it might also be a good *starting* point for man pages with actual detail...
