Are you reading something that favors Solaris/*bsd over GNU based systems?
No, why, are the Schily tools standard over there?
I've never had any doubts that current GNU tar would extract archives made with it 10+ years ago - in fact I'm fairly sure I've done that. Or that I'd be able to obtain a copy of it in the future.
Yeah, that is the plus side. But it seems gtar is rather abysmal at recovering from errors in archives so if there is ever a problem, you're cooked.
Is there any truth to that?