Until a few months ago, I had never really used BitTorrent to do anything - save for about 20 minutes back in HS almost 20 years ago (!)
(I think I was running uTorrent on Windows, it was weird and I really didn't know how to use it.)
However, in order to "acquire" [this][1], torrenting was realistically the only sensible option I had. A direct download from the Internet Archive would have taken roughly 7 hours @ 100 Mb/s. The torrent file was done in an hour.
To my great surprise, the link isn't dead, so...yeah :)
13GB would take less than 20 minutes at 100Mbps. Regardless, I’m not sure why you only consider near instant downloads “sensible”. I often spent several days downloading things when I was younger.
Yes, 100Mbps is ~12.5 MB/s, however when I initially tried the .mp4 link I found actual speeds to be much less, (hence the hours long wait I mentioned) so there's definitely throttling going on somewhere.
Also, don't count your chickens before they hatch. I remember downloading Flight Simulator 2002 mods over a 56K modem in my youth - anything over 10MB was a stretch - and I didn't actually have a broadband connection until I went off to college in 2005.
And here I was, still thinking Linux was "an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War".
Do you download directly from a mirror or use BitTorrent for this? (If the latter I think I kind of understand the rationale for the VPN)