We thought about doing this earlier on in HyperDev’s life but there were some reasons we didn’t at the time:
we wanted to use a package file format that was interoperable with existing projects and what people are used to - even if it’s pretty clunky in this case.
cson/coffee files let you write actual code (not just document info) that would lead to some awkward error cases to figure out on our end.
Nicer handling of packages is something we’re investigating in other ways right now (like with the ‘add packages’ button). But we’ll revisit package.coffee/cson if the situation improves for npm.