Currently there's no way to turn off the default backups. I may look into that for the 1.5 version. You could use the bz2 method for the normal backup and set it up to backup daily and keep 3, and then no daily backups in the archives. Or just use bz2 regular backups all round. There's a reason the git option is an *option* and not required.
With regards to rsync, I have no issue with it per ce, except that rsync excels at keeping two copies of a filesystem in sync, however the idea here is to create many copies at different points in time. If you rsync to an empty directory, you gain nothing. The two seem to be aimed at different tasks, so I'm not sure how rsync would help.
I will look into the weekly backups issue, thanks for the bug report there.