Custom Table or CCK?
Go with CCK.

I've done this in Drupal 5, and I'm doing it again for Drupal 6.  It's really not that hard to get this going.  You gets all kinds of things for free both with CCK and Views.  You already mentioned the benefits for Views, but it's the same for CCK.  You simply create everything you need from the UI, and then export it to a file that gets read during your install hook.

Also, why write your own CRUD?

I'm doing something very similar.  Take a look at my code over at Syndeploy.

I haven't exported the Views code yet, but I'll get there.