Hi,
What do you mean by "opening"? enwiki pages-meta-history is hard due to its size, not because Ariel or Tomasz being more stupid than any volunteer. I trust them to do it at least as well as a volunteer would. Of course, if you can perform better I'm all for giving you a shell to fix it, and the scripts are there for improvements as well.
I wasn't aware that the dump scripts were publicly available, where can they be downloaded from or are they part of mediawiki?
What do you need exactly about the images? Which image dumps do you want? Do you have enough terabytes to store them? Dumps/Access has been given by request in the past to that data. If it's not there it's because: a) Those dumps would take a lot of space.
I don't think that is a valid reason, thumbnail dumps of all the images from enwiki would probably be a smaller file than the current enwiki pages-meta-history bz2 file.
b) Nobody feels particulary interested in them.
I disagree, there has been a lot of interest in having image dumps available for download. There was a discussion on this recently on the xmldatadumps list, that basically concluded that subsets of images (ie. enwiki thumbnails) would be useful. There are wiki pages dedicated to this topic of how to download images, this is because there are no image dumps available. Is the wikimedia foundation interested to host image dumps again? If they are maybe we can start a discussion on how to make the script and what image dumps to start with.
cheers, Jamie