Torrents are shit.
that's because you, like most torrent users, probably went to the free torrent sites like meganova, mininova, bitenova, supernova, all those nova sites, thepiratebay, and so forth. on those sites, you don't need membership to download and since it's p2p, there's gonna be a very small amount of people who'll feel inclined to share something they just downloaded to their downloads folder to a bunch of strangers instead of removing the torrent from the torrent program and sorting your download to where you would want it on your harddrive(s).
the torrent technology is as fast and reliable as the internet will allow, you just need to not go to those free sites and try to get a membership at a good site instead. sure, it sucks having to maintain a ratio and all, but leaving your computer on over night saves you that hassle. some sites let you buy ratio too if you can't maintain it. i have always stayed above 0,5 on most sites.
sites like oink are tight. on oink, most of the music was either ripped by the members or were scene rips (it would say which). everything was 192kbps+. no tape rips were allowed. transcodes (re-encoded mp3s) were removed instantly. i remember doing a search for "el-p" and finding all his albums in three different file formats/qualities and about 15 vinyl and cd singles. all with tracklists and a lot of them with covers. you don't get that from limewire, shit you don't even get it from here. most albums would contain a log file that showed a log of the ripping process as verification that it was top notch quality. you never had to worry about skips, such torrents would be removed and re-requested as soon as they were noticed.
my connection has a downloading capacity of 456kb/s and i get that from all the torrent sites where i had a membership cause they were "serious". sorry for the lengthy response, i just hate the torrent-hate because torrents really do rock. when i'm sitting up waiting for an episode to leak if it's a show i fucking love, like lost, heroes, dexter or the wire, it'll take me 15-20 minutes once it appears on the site before i can start watching it.
