OpenSUSE doesn't have a mechanism for caching repo content locally for sharing
between hosts, mirrors around here can be slow and bad, plus I see it as bad
style to waste server bandwidth.

So the next best thing is sharing /var/cache/zypp/packages/.

That works only if the configured repos on all hosts are identical. Any host
which does not have a repo configured proceeds to simply delete all cached
content of that repo.

Please - not having a downloaded-rpms-cache is pretty bad in my opinion, but
going out of the way to delete already downloaded data is not acceptable.

It is my understanding that the package updates are controlled by the repo
metadata anyway that is downloaded when refreshing repos, and there should be
no need to delete any already downloaded rpm. Old hardware these days is likely
RAM bound, but not disk-space bound, and anyone really having space problems
can manually delete /var/cache/zypp/packages/ without detriment to future
package updates.

Can zypper please refrain from deleting any already downloaded rpms/drpms?