> Is it just that the write once nature of the media makes pre-composing the file system a pain?
I think it's sort of the opposite. Read-only/write-once file systems can be simpler because they don't have to be structured in a way that allows things to change. For instance, full file systems generally need to deal with files that are laid out in a non-contiguous manner on the disk since files may change in size after creation.
I think the other aspect is that in the early days of CD-ROM a lot of folks envisioned there would be a lot of use cases that transcended a single operating system so having a universal file system for them was useful. And while some of the grander visions may not have won out, distributing plain data (photos, clip-art, etc.) on CD-ROM was a common use case and benefited from a cross-platform filesystem.
I think it's sort of the opposite. Read-only/write-once file systems can be simpler because they don't have to be structured in a way that allows things to change. For instance, full file systems generally need to deal with files that are laid out in a non-contiguous manner on the disk since files may change in size after creation.
I think the other aspect is that in the early days of CD-ROM a lot of folks envisioned there would be a lot of use cases that transcended a single operating system so having a universal file system for them was useful. And while some of the grander visions may not have won out, distributing plain data (photos, clip-art, etc.) on CD-ROM was a common use case and benefited from a cross-platform filesystem.