“with the stupid mandatory encryption”
As someone who has been pushing for encryption in HAss backups for a long time, I disagree with the “stupid” part. Those backups have A LOT of sensitive info in them, and (especially when you have off-site backups, as you should!) encryption is essential.
True, it would be nice to have some kind of decryption utility allowing you to quickly extract just one file - but I am sure that will come along quite quickly, now that the encrypt/decrypt code is in place.