Huh? It doesn't really feel like much hassle for me.
I don't think there really are other ways to deal with VPKs other than GCFScape - and GCFS does it near perfectly.
You can use it to extract all off the content to a usual folder and then do stuff with it there (and it's a practice), but I don't see much advantages of that, and the content is pretty damn hefty and will take both time to unpack and copy and storage space.