I think one of the greatest problems with any codec but seems to be much more obvious with x265 is that folks never state the quality of compression (ie. L1 to L4). You've been watching stuff that's been compressed hard with one pass and it's gonna be small but look like shit. Maybe that's a kid in a basement or maybe they've got 100 more episodes to do so they don't take the time to do mulitple passes and more complex encodes.

A futher problem is that for all the crunching down it takes processing to uncrunch it - so many phones still don't do x265 much less use it and suck up their batteries.

Tigole is always A+++ I've been a fan of various release groups but I've never been a fanboy until now. I even wrote this article: https://infogalactic.com/info/Tigole

I still don't understand what you mean. I'm interested in invite to private. Where is it, and and how do I get invited?

Right now I have high-down and low-up but will be getting fibre in my area within the year. We'll see how much that changes anything. I may need to get a VPN, like what Happysmash is building.