Bicycles vs. cars? A better comparison would be using public transportation vs. buying your own car. There's a big investment in buying your own car, but once you've got it, and you learn how to drive it and maintain it, you can go wherever, whenever. The bus is cheap (perhaps even free in some areas), and goes most places, but it's on a schedule so you have to wait for it. You don't have to do anything, just wait and hop on when it arrives. Many people would agree that owning your own car is a good idea, but in some areas, it may be more convenient and economical to just walk+public transportation, even if occasionally the person will wish they had a car to get to some specific appointment a little ahead of schedule, or if they have a job where owning their own car is a necessity.
My point was you said "Somebody with usenet could get SW Revisited in maybe a little over an hour, while you have some people here who have been downloading it off the torrent since the beginning of this week and still are only about halfway done."
So it took you 60 minutes to get the entire DVD from usenet, it took me 12 hours (with only one person seeding). But what you said implied people can expect it to take 14 DAYS. That's a very misleading statement. Unless they're using dialup (in which case usenet is going to be slow as well) or their computer is shut off most of the time, they'll actually be getting it faster than I did, with more people seeding now.
The torrents weren't available for the first two days the release was out (though without the PAR files, the pal wasn't really useful, and the NTSC came out later anyhow). Plenty of people trying to use USENET to get the pal version had lots of other problems that meant they weren't getting to watch the movie right away anyhow. By the time the torrent was ready, those problems were ironed out.
If a person's goal was to be the first one on their block to see the video at all costs, then it may have mattered.
Me, I got what I wanted and didn't have to pay a dime extra, or jump through any hoops, just wait for it to become available, fire and forget.
If people would rather try USENET (for those who don't use it religiously already), they can, but why the added hassle?
Anyway, good luck to you HD-DVD guys. Maybe a new firmware will come out to help you? Can people hack their own firmware?
I'm also curious, has anyone tried it with an "upconvert" player yet? How does it look?