The basis for transferring file metadata is already there in zip in the form of -V for VMS file system metadata. This works well and can be used to transfer files via intermediate platforms which don't support that metadata.
It's not as seamless as one might wish; you do have to use zip. do the transfer and then unzip on the target, and of course remember to use -V in the first place.
FTP implementations also exist in the VMS world for transferring the file metadata, but I haven't used these myself so can't comment on their usability in practice.
Indeed, ZIP gets us part of the way there, and also handles the issue of transferring more than one file in one download request.
The downside to ZIP is that the information is cast away once you decompress it. If your file system doesn't maintain that metadata (eg Windows and file permissions), then it's just gone.
You also can't really just keep your files in ZIP because operating systems don't really natively integrate transparent ZIP support into files, and you probably don't want the file compressed in most cases (your app may want to read it often, and not want to pay the cost of decompressing the whole thing.)
It's not as seamless as one might wish; you do have to use zip. do the transfer and then unzip on the target, and of course remember to use -V in the first place.
FTP implementations also exist in the VMS world for transferring the file metadata, but I haven't used these myself so can't comment on their usability in practice.