Dear Maintainer, The "cat<n>" directories are empty on my computer so there is no saving there. I could use uncompressed man pages for general use, so I suggest that should be provided if the user wants that. Nowadays computers usually have abundant disk place, and only use a part of the provided software and thus only a part of the provided man pages by a operation system.
Control: reassign -1 debian-policy Providing uncompressed manual pages would be a matter for Debian policy, not for man-db, so I'm reassigning this there. However, I must say that I am not in favour. Since man-db decompresses pages in-process, there's negligible performance advantage (possibly a performance disadvantage in some cases), and the benefit is unlikely to be worth the effort.