There are numerous ways that I can think of to improve pano replacements, like just overwriting the existing ones, like you pointed out, by dragging and dropping edited panos or even better and more powerful by using a protocol like FTP that would quickly allow batch replacements.
It also would be nice if the existing blur functionality was turned into a more feature rich pano editor for a quick, basic edits. The open source world is full of functionality like that that I expect would be straightforward to implement.
Sounds even nicer! However, that would be way more work in development and testing time, whilst download/upload zip only requires a minimal user interface and some unzip/move files logic on the server. Seems like something that could quickly become available