Using the CR sounds right. Remember that the CR allows you to map cr_items arbitrarily to files in the filesystem, you're not limited to allowing it to store files in directories of its choice.
This is how the static pages package works, for instance, it "wraps" your static HTML files with cr_item/cr_revision pairs in order to give the general comments package an object that comments can be related to.
But your right that serving up these files sounds much like what Carl needs as is being discussed in the other thread.