That way for those of us outside the US who cannot find a MapsonXXX equivalent we can record/create routes we use simply and easily.

Well you could use google and find in a couple of seconds programs like
www.gartrip.de and http://home.t-online.de/home/gpsinfo/ which allow you to create tracks and routes based on digitized topographic maps by tracing the track you want to follow.

If you're from england and rather not use those german programs, www.gpsu.co.uk does similar stuff.

Either that or we dust off the old talk from some time ago about a special "raw" disk driver that reads and writes disk blocks itself directly [no need for mounting the special filesystem then.

Writing to the disk is writing to the disk, whether you use a filesystem or write the blocks yourself. i.e. you could create a single large file without holes in any given filesystem and as long as it doesn't change it size the access is equivalent to writing to a raw device.

However, it is simply the actual process of writing bits to the disk that is dangerous. I believe some recent IBM 3.5" IDE drive was renowned for writing even when the power was cut so it would scribble over low level data between the tracks. This basically turned the disks into a brick that could be shipped back to the factory.