* In the long run, I want to move away from the concept of bases, and instead implement surface structures as an additional quadtree layer. In that context, a base wouldn't be a physical entity, but just happen to be a place containing an assembly of buildings and runways/pads. (the latter possibly not defined as a structure, but just as part of the surface textures).
This means that there is already a pressing need for a tree merging/diffing tool. Without it, rollout of base development would be even more difficult than it is now.
As a base developer, you'd have to distribute a tree diff that users can merge into their global tree. To make it also easily removable, a concept of a inverse diff must be possible, so users can uninstall it without having to download/extract the complete pristine tree again (and potentially losing other addon patches in the process).