I wonder how likely it is our guys in England would implement FLAC support on our favorite toy.

I'd really like that too. In little time cost/mb will be so low that there will be no need for loss-compression, I think. I personally would not hesitate to use flac rather than mp3 even if I "only" had two 120Gb hdd in my empeg, rather than the two 30Gb ones I currently have.