Wedge

With the include parameter there should be a way, maybe a script that checks if that file exist in all the folders, writes in another file all the folders in which this file exist and then rearranging this list of folders to be included in a "location" parameter.
http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location
http://wiki.nginx.org/CoreModule#include
Uhm no :(

Yup, that's the thing - we use htaccess to do non-standard handling of .gz files on specific types of request. Yes, it's possible to remap that in nginx, I just don't know what configuration you'd need. But we can't deploy per-folder rules in nginx, that's one of the things that makes it faster, it doesn't do the massive hit of folder traversal finding .htaccess files...

Uhm, asking on serverfault?

I should add, after my experimentation in recent times on a shared host, I'm strongly motivated to set this hard-core caching to off (leave parsing etc. running, but not gzipping the files on the server by default)

It was not a particularly exciting test run to start with.