Sorry about the lack of response. Your feature requests are quite reasonable, but I have no idea of the timeframe when I'll work on them (they're not a priority for me). Perhaps someone else is interested in helping implement them.
The things I planned to tackle for a post-1.9 release are compression support and proper password "manager". BTW, have you tried `--http-user' and `--http-passwd'? They're supposed to do pretty much what you describe.
