I understand your position, and indeed I worried over what to call the new option and what value(s) to recognize. I also tried to keep the actual Perl coding consistent with how other options hashes worked. Because it's a hash, it needs the => value part (not just -nocompress). A value of 1 for flags seems to be the norm. And the normal way of coding the handling of such flags is if ($options{'-flagname'}), which means that a value of 0 is not normally used because it wouldn't be recognized with such code. It came down to having slightly more complex Perl code that wouldn't match all the other flags' coding style.
If you feel very strongly about this, we can discuss it. I just want to have the issue settled before version 3.002 goes out the door (at least a month from now, as a rough guess, depending on what I end up doing with the name constant ~time() issue, and some other minor leftovers from my 3.001 to-do list). Finally, we could consider -flate as the name, although there is still the issue of 0 versus 1 (default).