I still think you are better off with the rsync approach. Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that rsync provides much better throughput than yum plus compression. Have you looked at http://tqmcube.com/repo.php ?
BTW, extras is now using repoview (which I recommend). You can get a look at it here: http://fedoraproject.org/extras/4/i386/repodata/
I started to do the rsync approach first, and it did seem faster than the rate yum-pull is going, but it seemed like yum-pull was easier to setup and get going with all the stuff that I wanted. Any chance you have some more examples than are on that page? Maybe I'm making it harder than it needs to be. I'm not a yum expert so figuring out where to get everything, and understanding the directory structure is a little confusing.
I would like to do FC4 with updates and extras plus atrpms, livna, freshrpms, maybe dag. I'd also like to do CentOS 4.2 and Suse 9.2/9.3.
Any help is appreciated. James