Like I said, the original goal was to have something to stream old movies. There is no service I could reliably find things pre-1970, especially the cardboard era of special effects. I'm a huge fan of the hammer horror films and every now and again I'll want to watch Mothra or Metropolis. Good luck finding anywhere to stream them outside of the "watch x online" sites which generally have poor quality or are mislabeled.

The torrenting features were tacked on later, and honestly I don't think it was much work at all. Setting up a proxy credit card just to sign up for another subscription service is more annoying to me than playing with server gear for a weekend.