I'll make a Wish List item for this, but would like to see it sooner, thus this thread...

PACK should be changed to use the new .DBF it creates anyway regardless of whether there were actually records deleted or not.

This would cost absolutely NOTHING more than current processing costs - it could still legitimately bypass the REINDEX step because the .DBF would still be unchanged (only relocated).
Meanwhile, people could have confidence that their action did indeed perform some useful work. For instance, relocation could cause avoidance of (hard to detect outwardly) bad track(s) that could be causing odd failures.