(context: I have had a situation where files created by pbzip2 on linux were not able to be decompressed with some library on .NET, but using lbzip2, they were. I never looked into the details.)
Can't agree more, lbzip2 is the go-to tool for dealing with bzip2 compression and decompression, it's a whole lot of faster than bzip2 which is single-threaded!