I agree information shouldn’t be behind an invitation, but it does solve 3 important things:

• Keeps the law out of your hair
• Seed requirements ensure torrents stay alive
• Incentivizes strict quality control and uploading new content

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve downloaded something from a public source and it’s been crap quality, or isn’t even the thing I wanted to download. Sometimes the file is fine but it takes 3 weeks to download because it has one seeder with a 10kbps upload rate. That’s a big “if” on if I can find it at all if it’s something more obscure.

Until someone solves those 3 issues in another way, I don’t see a better solution.

What did you switch to? I’ve tried to give rtorrent a go, but config is a pain and rutorrent craps itself when you have a lot of torrents. rtorrent + flood is the most promising I’ve tried other than the obnoxious setup but I’m pretty entrenched in deluge and flood was pretty early in development when I tried.

All the time. I deal with a lot C# code that makes and responds to HTTP API requests, and being able to check if requests and responses are properly formed without having to slap print statements everywhere is a godsend.