Maybe it doesn't have any legacy cruft?

It's worse than Transmission because it has no mention of any good modern-ish features such as DHT, PEX, LSD(LPD) and it lacks both Linux, OSX and BSD support. Oh and it's banned (not-whitelisted) from all the private trackers.

(Author here) I haven't listed the specific features from Rasterbar-libtorrent but I'll make sure to do that in an upcoming update, to make it clearer. It supports DHT, PeX and LSD as well as various proxies (SOCKS4, SOCKS5, HTTP).

The first few versions actually had the vanilla Rasterbar-libtorrent peer ID and user agent, and in v0.5 users could opt-in to use PicoTorrent peer ID and user agent, and a few versions after that I made that the default.

I've been in contact with as many private trackers I could find and it's an ongoing effort to discuss with them what they require for whitelisting.

It’s a basic UI on top of libtorrent. So it has those features.

It’s very simple and that makes it effective enough for me. All I’ve got is some arch iso files. A fedora and a CentOS file. It starts instantly and connects to 800 DHT nodes, as opposed to Qbittorrent 2-3 seconds and 350 nodes.

I don’t know about private trackers. I don’t have anything I want to pirate.

I don’t see cross platform as a plus for mini sized, simple graphical applications. I see it as an advanced curl.

In my experience most private trackers allow clients that use libtorrent in general rather than specific clients that use it (e.g rTorrent).

The readme for this project specifies the user agent of the client as Picotorrent/x.y.z, which makes me think that most private trackers would block it.

Spoof it.

FYI, rTorrent use the other libtorrent by rakshasa

The screenshot in the README mentions DHT in the status bar.