Currently if I download the tgz from github releases (see #95) and I run tar -zxvf it will place each gene folder into my current directory.

This is not considered best practice, see:

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/distpractice.html

Instead, make sure your archive files all have a common directory part named after the project, so they will unpack into a single top-level directory directly beneath the current one.