I think you misunderstood the issue. There is no easier way, I don't have a windows machine and I have no way of running win VM.
At any rate, I figured out how to do it. Install Keka from http://www.kekaosx.com. It will create a data.zip file that will work on the head unit. I believe Keka uses the 7zip library rather than the stuff from Info-Zip, which is what comes with OSX.
I also played with python, using the zipfile.ZipFile class. I believe that would work as well, but I didn't feel like writing a python script to test things out.
I hope this helps folks.